The Silicon Review ^Asia

Pavee Ramanisankar, the founder of Finwego, has discovered the most pressing issue faced by educational institutions from her personal experience leading K-12 school chain Akshara Vidyaashram. The issue was raising capital, which she realized after many rejections from banks and lending institutions in India. This led to the start of Finwego, a lending venture based in Chennai, which provides customized loans to managements, schools, staff, vendors, and teachers.

A graduate from IIM-Bangalore, Pavee founded the company along with her husband Shiv Vadivelalagan, to start Finwego, incubated at Harvard University. Shiv has extensive experience in the Fintech space. During her masters in education at Harvard, she had won a grant of $25,000 applied from Harvard Innovations Lab. Loans starting from INR 20,000 to INR 2,00,000 are provided to teachers as they often face difficulty to get loans, considering the corporate structure of a school. The company has three main products: secured and unsecured loans to private schools, supply chain financing for vendors supplying to schools, and unsecured personal loans to teachers, though its main focus is private schools. The interest rate for a secured loan is 19 to 21 percent and 24 percent for unsecured loans.

The company currently operates in Karnataka, Pondicherry, and Tamilnadu and has worked with more than 500 schools till now. The company is eyeing a 10x growth with a loan book size of INR 250 crore by the end of FY21.