Lendingkart History & Founding Timeline

In its early years, Lendingkart faced criticism that it grew its loan book faster than its underwriting models had matured for certain borrower segments and geographies, resulting in elevated NPA ratios that required significant provisioning and balance sheet repair. The lesson — that underwriting model accuracy must be validated at scale before aggressive volume growth — was incorporated into subsequent growth planning but came at a cost in capital efficiency and investor confidence during the correction period.

Lendingkart was relatively slow to adopt the co-lending model after RBI formalized the framework in 2020, continuing to rely primarily on balance sheet lending when co-lending partnerships could have expanded origination capacity at lower capital cost. Competitors who adopted co-lending more aggressively were able to grow loan volumes faster and offer lower rates to borrowers. The eventual scaling of co-lending has proven beneficial, but the delayed adoption left a competitive gap in the 2020–2022 period.

Lendingkart's near-exclusive focus on short-term working capital loans, while strategically coherent, has left revenue concentration risk in a single product line whose performance is sensitive to MSME economic cycles. Competitors who expanded into term loans, supply chain finance, and embedded lending products have diversified their revenue base and customer relationships in ways that provide resilience when working capital loan demand softens. Lendingkart's belated exploration of product adjacencies suggests recognition of this strategic gap.