Quality education can make or break a society. With the right education, individuals can improve personal lives and help society run smoothly. 

Presently, when the demand for education loans is at an all-time high, a segment of learners still find it difficult to finance their education. The majority of them are students having no credit history or parents having a credit history ineligible for loan approval from traditional financing players. 

To solve this issue, a trio of entrepreneurs started Propelld, a fintech startup that approves student loans by going beyond traditional underwriting norms and assessing their loan repayment capability based on their academics, type of institute, and outcome of the course into account, along with credit history.

Founding Team 

Founded by Bibhu Prasad Das, Brijesh Samantaray, and Victor Senapaty (IIT, IIM Alumnus), Propelld is revolutionizing the way students avail financing for their education and shape their careers. The startup creates personalized loan products for every institute segment based on the type of course, the course’s end-use, and borrower profiles coming to those institutes.

With a 100% digital, super quick and seamless loan process, Propelld goes beyond traditional credit under-writing methods to assess a learner’s repayment capabilities and take academic data, institute data, etc., into consideration.

“We started Propelld to not just make money for ourselves, but instead we believe that education has exponential positive effects on the socio-economic scenario. And one of the major issues that limit access to education is financing. With financing, Propelld aims to democratize access to education. There should be no barrier to quality education,” says Bibhu Prasad Das in an exclusive conversation with The StartupLab. 

How Propelld Operates

Propelld creates a win-win situation for all the stakeholders involved like Lender (NBFC/Bank), Educational Institute and Students/Parents.

It helps institutes by increasing their top of funnel sales with an option of financing, decreasing the duration of on-boarding a student, providing customized loan products to back their course offerings and higher approval rates to cater to more students. Additionally, it provides them with a dedicated source of support for their students during the loan process, 

Propelld lets students pay their fees in manageable small EMI amounts, skip hectic manual loan processes, and provides them with higher chances of getting loan approval.

Present Growth And Future 

Running successfully with a team of 150 employees, Propelld has become the market leader in skilling, ed-tech and job-focused markets.

With 550+ partnered Educational Institutions, the startup has disbursed loans for more than 70000 Students and achieved 10X growth within the past 18-20 months. Profitable on an EBITDA level, with NPAs below 1%, Propelld has an annual disbursal run-rate of 500 Cr.

The startup has aggressive plans and aims to become an undisputed market leader in the education markets like skill-up and ed-tech, where they have a full-fledged presence.

Talking about the future plans, Brijesh Samantaray says,

“Leading in the skill-up and edtech education markets, we’re now eyeing the K-12 school market. Having achieved market fit product in education segments like K-12 schools, we would put aggressive efforts in these markets as they’re the biggest education market segments. As a near-future plan, we want to focus on creating loan products that are a lot more strategically relevant for institutions to back their course offerings.”

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