Aeries Financial Technologies Pvt. Ltd, that owns the app-only lending platform CASHe, has raised about $3.8 Mn (INR 25 Cr) Series A funding from an investor group led by Mathew Cyriac (Senior Managing Director at Blackstone Group). With this move, Cyriac will join the Board of CASHe as an Investor Director.

The startup will use the funding to increase CASHe’s scale of business. The company also announced that it has appointed Dr. Pulak Ghosh to its Board of Directors.

As per V. Raman Kumar, Chairman, Aeries Financial Technologies: “Dr. Ghosh brings to CASHe his enormous domain knowledge, experience and expertise in big data analytics. His inclusion further reinforces the preeminent position that CASHe has established for itself in the AI, data analytics and machine language-backed new age financial technology space in India.”

Launched in April 2016, Mumbai-based CASHe is an app-only lending company that provides immediate short-term personal loans to young professionals based on their social profile, merit and earning potential using its proprietary algorithm-based machine learning platform. The company is targeting young working professionals in the age group of 23-35 years and offers loans ranging from INR 5,000 to INR 1,00,000 payable over 15, 30 and 90 days.

Powered by its algorithm-driven, credit scoring platform, The Social Loan Quotient (SLQ), CASHe quickly determines a user’s credit worthiness by using multiple unique data points to arrive at a distinct credit profile of the customer. As per a company statement, CASHe is completely automated and requires no personal intervention and no physical documentation, and the average time taken for a loan to be disbursed is about eight minutes, subject to proper submission of all documents.

The startup claims to disburse loans about $154K (INR 1 Cr) per day.. In January 2017, CASHe entered into a strategic sales partnership with financial distributor Andromeda. They have also partnered with mobile payments and commerce firm Paytm to allow users to deposit cash transfers from CASHe to their Paytm wallets.

Earlier today it was reported that Mumbai-based Unicorn India Ventures, a SEBI registered AIF-I VC fund invested an undisclosed amount in Bengaluru-based SmartCoin. Other startups in this segment include KrazyBee, Onemi, Finomena, Quicklo.