Department of Business Administration

University of Lucknow
2021

Subject: Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Topic: Entrepreneurial Profile & Case Study on CRED

Name: Aditya vikram singh

Roll No: 200012135265

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to express my special thanks of gratitude to

my teacher as well as our HOD who gave me the golden
opportunity to do this wonderful project on the topic
Entrepreneurial Profile & study on Cafe coffee day,
which also helped me in doing a lot of research and I
came to know about so many new things I am really
thankful to them.
CRED

1.ABOUT

Cred is an Indian fintech company, based in Bangalore, founded in

2018 by Kunal Shah. CRED app's main feature is reward-based credit
Entrepreneurial Profile & study on CCDcard payments. Later, CRED
let users to make house rent payments and introduced short-term
credit lines. CRED has received criticism for being overvalued and
lacking a sound monetization strategy.

CRED was founded in 2018 by Kunal Shah; by 2021, the company

had onboarded over 5.9 million users and processed about 20% of all
credit card bill payments in India.As of April 2021, CRED offered five
distinct products - CRED RentPay, CRED Cash, CRED Pay, CRED
Store and CRED Travel Store. However from August 20, 2021 Cred
also launched a Peer to Peer(P2P) lending feature known as Cred
Mint that aims to monetise through its 7.5 million users.
Kunal Shah describes CRED as being a TrustTech company rather
than a FinTech, that his motivation to start CRED comes from solving
trust issues in the Indian society, which he believes is key to economic
prosperity.

MARKETING
CRED became the official sponsor for the Indian Premier League for
three years from 2020 to 2022,in a Rs. 120 crore deal. In 2021,
CRED's advertising content and videos, made in-house featuring
Indian celebrities, generated significant discourse in news and social
media due to its peculiarity, which was both criticized and praised.
CRED is offering instant personal loan to its users in the form of
CRED Cash,[35] available under money tab. The interest rate on the
loan is 15.5%, there is processing fee as well which varies according
to the loan amount. The tenure of the loan is from 1 to 48 months.

Founder

Kunal Shah is among a number of Indian entrepreneurs who have

launched new ventures for the second time. An MBA dropout from
Mumbai’s Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Shah had
earlier launched ventures such as PaisaBack, a cashback and
promotional discount campaign platform for retailers. But he shutdown
PaisaBack to set up FreeCharge in August 2010 along with Sandeep
Tandon. The startup was acquired by Snapdeal in April 2015. After the
acquisition, FreeCharge continued to be run as an independent entity
under Shah's leadership. He, however, left the firm in October 2016.
Subsequently, in July 2017, Axis Bank acquired FreeCharge. Kunal’s
second stint at entrepreneurship comes a little over two years after he
stepped down as the chief executive of FreeCharge.

Background
Kunal did his Bachelor of Arts and Philosophy from Wilson College,
Mumbai. Soon after the completion of his graduation; Kunal went
against his family trend of joining the family business (which mostly
deals in pharmaceutical distribution in South Bombay) and was
recruited by a start-up BPO called TIS International Inc as their junior
programmer in 2000. Sandeep Tandon – an investor in the start-up
had come down from the United States to work with the company. He
met with Kunal, loved his personality, and immediately struck up a
professional relationship. Kunal went on to work in the company for
ten years. He also helped Sandeep expand the business to 1200 more
companies, which is no easy feat for a beginner and demands
recognition.

By 2010, Kunal saw himself up to the challenge of entrepreneurship;

he set down the papers and began working on it. He launched
PaisaBack, a cashback and promotional discount campaign platform
for retailers. Later, he shut down PaisaBack to set up FreeCharge in
August 2010 along with Sandeep Tandon. The startup was acquired
by Snapdeal in April 2015. After the acquisition, FreeCharge continued
to be run as an independent entity under Shah’s leadership. He,
however, left the firm in October 2016. Subsequently, in July 2017,
Axis Bank acquired FreeCharge.

After that Kunal worked in different companies at different roles such

as Chairman, Advisor, etc.

In the year 2018, he founded CRED, which aims to make paying credit
card bills simpler and reward you for paying them on time.
Startups in which Kunal Shah has invested
Plum : Plum is an employee based health insurance startup that was
founded in 2019 by Abhishek Poddar and Saurabh Arora. Over the
years, it has completely altered the notion of employee health
insurance stack by introducing innovative fraud detection algorithms.
Its real-time designs and pricing makes it extremely easy for the users
to navigate through their website.
Qoohoo : Qoohoo is a mobile app which allows creators to launch
their private community that focuses on monetisation. It was founded
by Vimal Singh and Aseem Gupta. Kunal Shah along with a few other
angel investors invested close to $8 million in this creator-based
social platform.
This Bangalore-based company will utilise the fund to further build on
their engineering and product teams. As of now they have seven
members and they aim to expand their team up to 10 to 12 in the next
one year. The investment was announced in March 2021

Mensa Brands: Mensa Brands is a startup founded by ex-Myntra and

Medlife co-founder Ananth Narayanan. They aim to build global digital
brands from India by collaborating with different entrepreneurs, by
making investments into their business and by providing the
company's expertise to scale the brand.
In May 2021, Kunal Shah along with other investors like Falcon Edge
Capital, Northwest Venture Partners, Mukesh Bansal etc invested over
$50 million in Mensa Brands during a series A funding. The startup
plans to make use of the funds to improve their marketing strategies
and working capital so as to work with more brands

Unacademy :
Unacademy is an online education platform that was founded in 2010.
Since then the startup had been thriving, revolutionising the entire
notion of online education in India. In 2015 Kunal Shah along with
other angel investors like Sachin Bansal, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Binny
Bansal, invested a total of $1 million in the startup. The funding was
led by Blume Ventures.

Onsurity : It was launched in 2020 with just 700 SMEs with them as
healthcare partners. Initially they only had around 70,000 users. The
company's aim to democratise healthcare for all including small
businesses was a very innovative idea which led to their expansion in
a very short span of time.
The firm became the first digital platform in India that provides
monthly employee benefit subscriptions to the users. In April 2021,
this Nexus Venture Partners backed healthcare startup Onsurity
received an undisclosed amount of funding from a group of investors.
Kunal Shah was a customer who turned into an active investor as far
as the startup was concerned. The startup was also supported by
other investors like Jitendra Gupta and Amit Lakhotia. The firm aims
to develop their tech stack and enhance customer experience by
utilising the funds received.
FamPay is a Bangalore-based startup that aims at raising a financially
aware generation of Indians. It was founded by Kush Taneja and
Sambhav Jain. In June 2021 many investors especially Kunal Shah,
Vladimir Tenev, Kevin Lin , Global Founders Capital invested a
whopping $38 million in series A funding that was led by Elevation
Capital.

Target Audience of Cred

As a business, Cred targets a very particular niche i.e Credit Card
Users.
It initially targeted wealthy individuals and created a community called
Cred Club. However, today anyone with a credit score of more than
750 points can get access to the facilities of Cred and be a part of its
club.
As of now, it is focusing on targeting Generation Y i.e people between
the age of 25 and 40, especially those over the age of 30.
All of the current marketing activities of Cred is curated around
seeking the attention of Generation Y. That’s why there is Rahul
Dravid, Javagal Srinath and Venkatesh Prasad in their ads and not
Virat Kohli or Hardik Pandya. Likewise, it has Madhuri Dixit, Anil
Kapoor and Kumar Sanu and not Alia Bhatt or Varun Dhawan.
Now that you know about its targeting strategy, let’s now understand
its actual business.
Business Model
CRED rewards users for paying bills through the app.
CRED partners with businesses to provide the offers. As a
result, the businesses gain exposure and traction on a
platform where people are already spending. As a result,
CRED gets more offers to display on their application.
Therefore, visitors have more reasons to join and pay their
bills through the app.
The 3 pillars of CRED's business model - Customers who
pay credit card bills, The CRED app, and the Businesses
who provide offers on the app.

1. CRED's Customers - Many people pay their credit

cards using payment apps or by directly logging into
their bank accounts. By using the CRED app, they can
perform the same function of paying their credit card
bills more beneficially. As more people use CRED to
earn benefits, they share those benefits more widely.
2. CRED App - The app allows users to sign up and see
all the available offers on paying their credit card bills.
As you continue to pay bills, you accumulate CRED
coins which you can redeem for the rewards
3. Businesses that provide offers on the app - Bringing
businesses on board and forming tie-ups with them is
 imperative for CRED. The CRED app gives small and
large businesses alike visibility as buyers of all types
use it.

In order to access CRED programs, a credit score of more

than 750 must be obtained. This application also allows
users to share certain data such as credit card numbers,
access to emails to track users' expenses and due
amounts, credit score, and how they invest their money.
CRED rewards its users with CRED coins for bill payments
whic can later be redeemed with the offers available. In
simple terms, CRED provides a basic incentive to make
prompt bill payments. To make offers more attractive to
the users, CRED partners with various businesses. In turn,
businesses achieve exposure to buyers from all walks of
life.

REVENUE MODEL

There are 2 prominent ways via which Cred earns its revenue:

1.Listing products and offers

 Cred, as we know, lists an array of products and offers that benefit its
users from a range of businesses. These businesses, in turn, pay
Cred a fee for their visibility. Every time a user avails of the offers,
Cred generates an income through it.
Using the financial data of the users - Cred accumulates the financial
data from the users who use the platform for paying their bills and
more. Along with providing Cred with the opportunity to introduce
more offers to their users using these data, Cred also has other banks
and financial institutions who pay them a fee for accessing these data.
These companies, banks, and financial institutions would eventually
approach the potential customers with their own set of products
aligned to their tastes.

2.Cred - Funding and Investors

Cred has raised a total amount of $722.2 million in funding over the 8
funding rounds that the brand has witnessed. The last Series E
funding round that the company saw was co-led by its existing
investors, Tiger Global and Falcon Edge on October 19, 2021, and
was worth around $251 million. DST Global, Insight Partners, Coatue,
Sofina, RTP, and Dragoneer were some other investors that took part
in the Series E round of fundraising. In the meanwhile, Cred also two
new investors - the London-based Marshall Wace and Steadfast
Venture Capital to its captable.

The company is currently valued at $4.01 billion, as of October 19,

2021, after the conclusion of its funding round.