Meet Hardika Shah
She is the Founder & CEO of Kinara Capital, which she founded in 2011.
Kinara Capital, a fast growing lending FinTech, simplifies access to business credit for Micro, Small Medium Enterprises (MSME’s), through its multilingual myKinara App,which determines eligibility in under 1-minute & provides loan disbursal in 24 hours, thereby enabling their rapid growth and financial inclusion.
To date, Kinara Capital has disbursed over ₹4,000 Crores in over 80,000 collateral-free business loans to small business entrepreneurs through its 125 branches functioning across 100+ cities in India. The impact of this has led to over ₹700 crores in income generation and over 300,000 jobs supported in local economies which has in turn positively impacted over a million lives in India in the last decade. Furthermore, it has pledged over ₹300 Crores for ‘HerVikas’, a programme designed to provide discounted business loans for women entrepreneurs.
To fuel its growth, Kinara Capital has raised over USD 500 million in debt and equity investments to date. Recently, it has received equity investment from marquee investors such as British International Investment (BII) – UK government’s development arm, Nuveen and Triple Jump.
Prior to launching Kinara Capital, Hardika spent two decades working as a management consultant, steering multimillion-dollar technology projects for Fortune 100 companies. in Australia, Japan, Singapore and several other countries. She studied her undergrad at Knox College, a liberal arts college in the USA and pursued an MBA with Columbia Business School and UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
For her work, Hardika has made a mark and has been recognized globally for disrupting small business lending in India. She was named Business Leader Creating Social Impact by BusinessWorld (2022), has received the Visionary Leadership Award from Financial Express (2022), named on Forbes ‘Top 20 Most Powerful Self-Made Women’ list in India (2021), recognized among ‘Top 75 Women Transforming India’ by the Government of India (2021), and has been honored as an Ashoka Fellow by Ashoka Foundation (2014) among many other accolades received.
Hardika has also steered Kinara Capital to become internationally recognized for its innovations by receiving the prestigious ‘Bank of the Year-Asia’ global award by the IFC, being ranked among ‘Top 500 High-Growth Companies in Asia-Pacific’ by the Financial Times for three consecutive years and named among ‘India’s Growth Champions’ for three consecutive years among other accolades
BUT…how did she get here?
Click on the video to know more!
