Another one of Bangalore’s startup gems, CRED is a story for many aspiring entrepreneurs who want to kickstart one of their own ideas. It was founded by Kunal Shah in 2018 and it achieved unicorn status within 3 years of its inception. Isn’t that an awe-inspiring story? And also talk about their innovative ads. It’s unlike anything we’ve seen in a long time in the Indian market.
Criticism aside, it’s not a joke to start a company and reach that status in such a short time(at least legally, am I right?). In 3 years, the company onboarded 59 lakh users! Talk about a moth to a flame. Credit cards have existed for years but no one started something like this at that time. An idea was waiting to be executed and then came Kunal Shah. He is so proud of his baby and who wouldn’t be?
Kunal Shah calls CRED a TrustTech company rather than a fintech company and he has good reason to say this. He says that his company is focused on solving trust issues in Indian society and the fact that credit usage is still not at its prime. There are a lot of trust issues with credit and it’s easy to say that’s justified. Borrowing money is not liberty like in the west. More than two decades after its introduction it’s still one of the least trusted things in our society.
How does CRED aim to solve this? Simple, by offering rewards for paying your credit card bills. It may have its downside like leading people to debt traps but using credit judiciously is one of CRED’s motives to help us reach economic prosperity. It aims at helping customers find the motivation to pay their bills on time. You have the money, you get the reward for paying your bills. This discourages late payments leading to fines. In one way, it aims at bringing punctuality in paying credit card bills.
CRED started offering other services like CRED RentPay, CRED Cash, CRED Pay, CRED Store and CRED Travel Store. Another new feature was released in August 2021 which would change CRED’s path as just a reward-based app. Personal loans. They offer it at 15.5% which is significantly less than what most offer. But its success is yet to be seen.
In October 2021, CRED started to seek new investors, reporting a $5.5 billion valuation, up from $2.2 billion recorded in April 2021. The fact that they were IPL sponsors made it a hot stock for investors and added to it their advertisements which caused quite a buzz. If you’re a Twitter user, you might’ve come across Kunal Shah because he’s quite active on it. He offers startup tips and it would be wise to take it, right? Here’s one such tweet from him –
Like this one, we have many ideas waiting to be executed and they’re just sitting there. Why not take initiative before someone else does? Maybe it turns out to be your golden egg. I think a platform like Startupedia would definitely bring your idea into the spotlight. I suggest you register. Who knows when another opportunity will come by? Maybe you can become another Kunal Shah.