Bengaluru-headquartered was founded in 2007 by former executives of Aztecsoft, VR Govindarajan and Debasish Chakroborty.
Perfios, which provides Software-as-a-Solution (SaaS) service to financial institutions for credit underwriting, raised $68 million earlier this month from returning investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Warburg Pincus as part of its ongoing Series C round, as per documents it filed with the Registrar of Companies (RoC).
On March 16 this year, Perfios said it acquired Mumbai-headquartered Karza Technologies, a SaaS platform for financial institutions, for nearly $78 million.
The startup is a real-time credit decisioning and analytics focused product company at present. However, when the company started in 2007, this wasn’t the problem statement it began with.
The beginning
Perfios initially began as a personal finance management firm.
In 2007, it started building a technology platform, which had the ability to acquire any kind of data and then do the analysis. Its first product was also in the personal finance space.
“It aimed to help people manage all finances — whether it is across bank accounts, credit cards, loans, insurance, or capital markets. It had the ability to suck this data in three ways and do the analysis,” Govindarajan told YourStory in an interaction.
In case of firms, this extended more towards the likes of cash flow and capital gain statements analysis, and automatic income tax filing.
“But, we had a challenge monetising it. There were not too many people willing to pay for it,” Govindarajan says.
That is when the company decided to pivot and approach businesses rather than consumers directly.
“We flipped the model, but leveraged the same technology platform and instead of doing it as a B2C (business-to-consumer), we converted it to a B2B (business-to-business) model, doing the same thing for digital lending systems,” he says.
Aware of the difficulties different stakeholders such as banks and borrowers face in the lending process, Perfios founders felt the problem statement could be to make the lending process smooth and simple.
They did a proof of concept for 12-18 months, adding an analysis layer specifically on top of the original product, after which they took the product to market.
“But the technology platform is still the same. It acquires the data it aggregates from different data sources. The difference is …….
Source: https://yourstory.com/2022/03/turning-point-saas-startup-perfios-personal-finance-management/amp