CredAble Revolutionizes Supply Chain Financing for India's MSMEs

India's MSME sector contributes over 30% to GDP and employs millions, yet access to working capital remains a critical bottleneck. Traditional lenders shy away from small businesses, deeming them "not creditworthy." The result? A vicious cycle where enterprises can't grow because they lack capital, and can't access capital because they haven't grown. Enter CredAble, a fintech platform founded by Nirav Choksi and Ram Kewalramani that is rewriting the rules of working capital financing by decoupling creditworthiness from the borrower.

Launched in March 2017, CredAble has grown rapidly to partner with over two dozen large corporations, serve 7,000+ vendors and dealers, and process an average of ₹1,000 crores per month in disbursements. Their secret? Transferring credit risk from small vendors to large corporates, creating an inclusive platform where access to capital doesn't depend on the borrower's credit rating but on the strength of their relationships with anchor customers.

The Problem: The Creditworthiness Paradox

The fundamental challenge in MSME lending is what Choksi and Kewalramani call the "creditworthiness paradox." When a small business approaches a bank for working capital, the bank evaluates the business's standalone credit profile. Most MSMEs lack substantial collateral or long credit histories, leading to automatic rejection. This happens even when these businesses are serving large, creditworthy corporates like Tata, Reliance, or Amazon.

"When you talk about getting SMEs and MSMEs access to financing in India, most banks don't want to finance that sector," explains Choksi. "A large percentage don't get access because banks think these companies are not credit worthy."

The irony, as Kewalramani discovered firsthand, is that these MSMEs often have reliable cash flows from large corporate customers but can't access capital to fulfill orders. "Although we were private equity funded and servicing some of the largest corporates in India, we could not raise any sort of working capital lines," he shares from his experience running a logistics business. "All these financial institutions wanted collaterals, which was very tough for an asset-light business like ours."

The Solution: Risk Transfer, Not Risk Taking

CredAble's breakthrough insight was simple yet revolutionary: Don't evaluate the MSME's creditworthiness—evaluate the corporate buyer's creditworthiness. By enabling vendor, dealer, distributor, and retailer financing within the ecosystem of large corporates, CredAble transfers the credit risk from the small business to the large corporate entity.

"We enable vendor dealer distributor retailer financing to a large segment of ecosystems of very large corporates," says Choksi. "We do that because we're able to transfer the credit risk from the vendor to the large corporate, and that's why we've been able to scale this really rapidly."

The "Just-in-Time" Financial Product

CredAble's innovation goes beyond traditional invoice discounting. While most competitors focused only on post-invoice financing, CredAble analyzed the entire cash conversion cycle and discovered a critical insight: the pain point was on the pre-invoice side.

"If you look at the entire cash-to-cash cycles for vendors, service providers who provide goods or services to large corporates, the cycle sits at about 100 days," Kewalramani explains. "Post-invoice period was 35 to 40 days, while 60 days was on the pre-invoice side. That's exactly where the pain point was felt for all vendors and dealers."

This "Just-in-Time" financial product is exceedingly unique to CredAble. They finance vendors, dealers, and distributors based on billable events clearly earmarked in their contracts with large corporates. This means capital flows when it's needed most—during production and service delivery—rather than waiting for the invoice to be generated and payment terms to begin.

Building the Business: From Paper to ₹1,000 Crores Monthly

The journey from concept to ₹1,000 crores monthly disbursements wasn't easy. When Choksi and Kewalramani launched, "nobody had heard of a concept like this," Choksi recalls. "It took a long time to get people to buy in—large customers to buy into an idea like this, or investors to buy into an idea like this."

The founders bootstrapped for two years, funding operations with their own capital while building the technology platform and proving the model. In April 2018, they raised their first round from Oaks Asset Management, a private equity fund that saw their vision despite the company being just "a piece of paper" at the time.

The COVID-19 pandemic became an unexpected accelerator. As financial institutions became risk-averse and only willing to lend to large players, CredAble's model became essential. "We've grown very rapidly in the last 12 months thanks to COVID, where demand for capital shot up dramatically and financial institutions were only willing to take bets on large players," Choksi notes. "That truly benefited us and the borrowers we work with."

Team Building: People as the Core Differentiator

Both founders emphasize that their team is their most valuable asset. "One of the things that both Nirav and I are supremely proud of is the kind of team we've built," says Choksi. "We've been very fortunate to have some of the sharpest, brightest, most enthusiastic, passionate people working at CredAble."

Their approach to hiring centers around vision alignment. They look for people who not only have the skills but also see themselves playing a meaningful role in CredAble's mission. "They buy into the vision of what we're trying to do and see somewhere in that vision seeing themselves play a role in it," explains Kewalramani.

The culture they've built is evident in their retention and growth. Most of the core team has been with them throughout the four-year journey. The founding team's ability to build not just a second layer but a third layer of dependable leadership has been crucial to their execution capability.

Entrepreneurship Lessons: From Failures to Frameworks

Both founders bring decades of entrepreneurial experience to CredAble. Choksi, with 25+ years as an entrepreneur, and Kewalramani, with 17 years spanning corporate restructuring, investment banking, and running a logistics business, have learned valuable lessons from their failures.

"Before I set up my first company and also during those 10 years when I built my first company, there were several ideas that went wrong, several investments that went wrong, several management decisions we took which almost bankrupted us," Choksi reflects. "When you're 20 or 21, you have the resilience and passion but don't have the experience to understand between exuberance and being rational."

Key Lessons for Entrepreneurs

1. You're Only as Good as Your Team: Both founders emphasize that building a great team is crucial. "Compensate them well, create ownership for them, ensure you give them a culture and environment where they can thrive and be their own," Choksi advises.

2. Ideas Are Cheap, Execution is King: This is a mantra both founders return to repeatedly. "I get an idea every hour, and that's cheap. What's really critical is executing it," says Choksi.

3. Financial Prudence: Treat every round of capital as if it's the last. "The way we look at capital is that this is probably the last round of capital we could ever raise. So what can we do with this now? How do we build a very successful large business out of this capital?"

4. Know When to Cut Losses: Kewalramani shares the lesson of failing fast. "When we realized a product wasn't going to work, we didn't keep pushing it and putting good money behind bad money. Understand you must fail, but at the same time, learn and don't push it beyond a certain point."

The Indian Entrepreneurship Ecosystem: Pros and Cons

Both founders are optimistic about India's entrepreneurial landscape. "From an opportunity and timing perspective, there could be no better place to be an entrepreneur than outside India right now," Choksi says.

The Pros:

• Vibrant startup ecosystem with funding at every stage
• Angel investors and institutional capital readily available
• Government is very pro-startup
• Humongous opportunity size in every sector
• High mobile and smartphone penetration
• Young, tech-savvy population

The Cons:

• Financial institutions need to gear up to support startups
• Compliance costs are high (GST registration, PAN cards, etc.)
• Simple things take too long and are expensive for young startups
• Ease of doing business needs improvement

"I don't see why we can't be far more successful than China," Kewalramani asserts. "China has so many restrictions. We've got the population, young demographic, smartphone penetration, and all the right ingredients. The VC ecosystem is pushing hard and backing the right people."

The Future: Scaling to ₹100,000 Crores

CredAble's journey has only just begun. The challenge now is scaling from ₹1,000 crores to ₹100,000 crores monthly. "How do we scale this quickly? What can we do to keep innovating along the way? How can we differentiate ourselves and offer a more holistic offering to our customers?" These are the questions that keep Choksi and Kewalramani motivated every day.

Their vision extends beyond just vendor financing. They're building a comprehensive working capital platform that partners with large corporates, banks, financial institutions, and capital markets to innovate continuously in product design, technology integration, and transaction structuring.

Key Takeaways

• Risk Transfer Model: CredAble's innovation is transferring credit risk from MSMEs to large corporates, making capital accessible regardless of borrower creditworthiness
• Pre-Invoice Financing: Their "Just-in-Time" product addresses the 60-day working capital gap before invoices are raised, based on billable events in contracts
• Team First: Both founders attribute their success to building a stellar team that believes in the vision and has created multiple layers of dependable leadership
• Financial Prudence: Treat every funding round as if it's the last, and focus on execution rather than just ideas
• Ecosystem Approach: Success requires partnering with large corporates, banks, and financial institutions to create comprehensive solutions
• Fail Fast, Learn Faster: Know when to cut losses on failed initiatives and apply those lessons to future decisions

As CredAble continues to transform working capital financing in India, the message is clear: access to capital shouldn't depend on who you are, but on who you do business with. By reimagining credit assessment and leveraging the strength of corporate ecosystems, Choksi and Kewalramani are ensuring that India's MSMEs have the fuel they need to grow, innovate, and power the economy forward.

About the Founders

Nirav Choksi is the Co-Founder and CEO of CredAble. An entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience, he spent his first decade building a product and technology services company, then built a global commodities and structured finance business out of Singapore before founding CredAble in 2017. He calls CredAble his "third and final try" to transform working capital financing in India.

Ram Kewalramani is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of CredAble. With 17 years of experience spanning corporate restructuring, investment banking with firms like Grant Thornton, and turning around a bankrupt logistics business as CEO, he brings deep operational and financial expertise. His personal experience struggling to access working capital for his logistics business inspired CredAble's mission.

CredAble is a fintech platform founded in March 2017 that transforms how working capital financing happens in India. By enabling vendor, dealer, distributor, and retailer financing within large corporate ecosystems, CredAble serves 7,000+ businesses and processes over ₹1,000 crores monthly in disbursements. Backed by Oaks Asset Management, CredAble is building India's most inclusive working capital infrastructure.