We were featured in the news again! This story appeared in The Indian Express:
On a weekday morning, in a pristine white office in JP Nagar, south Bangalore, half-a-dozen youngsters are hunched over their laptops. They are crunching numbers—of lives touched, of hopes nurtured, and of the money they themselves made in the process. Milaap, an online microfinance platform incubated last year at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, is one of those rare organisations with the energy of a tech start-up and the moral acuity of an NGO.
A proposition born out of Anoj Viswanathan’s desire to give flexible and affordable loans to the enterprising poor and Sourabh Sharma’s business acumen, Milaap stepped gingerly into the forbidding world of microcredit in July 2010. The duo, engineering graduates from the National University of Singapore, decided they would focus on seven key areas—education, sanitation, enterprise development, water, energy, sustainable farming and healthcare, roughly in that order.
“Microfinance rates are normally high, up to 26 per cent, and loans have traditionally been inflexible. We thought we could tackle the challenge of accessing low-cost capital with a transparent, online portal,” says Viswanathan, 24, who has behind him a stint with SKS Microfinance that involved rigorous field work in northern Orissa. Milaap has raised.
Read the rest of the article on their website here.
