The latest claimant of the highly coveted unicorn tag within the Indian startup scene is the Bengaluru based CRED. A mobile-based rewards platform that allows you to pay using the CRED app is one of the most exciting players in the fintech world.
Founded in 2018 by Kunal Shah, the company is currently valued at USD 2.2 million and has raised money in four rounds of funding to date backed by DST Global, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Capital. Just like most of the unicorns within the Indian startup scene, they are yet to make a profit and have registered losses of above INR 350 crores last year. This could have a lot to do with the marketing expenditure and the sponsorship deal with the IPL.
One of the main reasons that CRED has suddenly become the talk of the town is its very creative ads that immediately catch the attention of the viewer and divide them into two – the ones who get it and the ones who don’t. Unfortunately, their target audience is spread out in both.
The ads that hit your TV screen last year during the IPL was memorable because of the willingness of legends like Anil Kapoor, Madhuri Dixit, Udit Narayan, Alka Yagnik and the amazing Bappi Lahri to poke fun at themselves. The unique spin on the ads was truly attention-grabbing but it did not provide information to the public on what this is all about.
They took it up a notch this year by having the always impressive Jim Sarbh, explain the features of the ad before cutting to the celebrity doing something that we least expect. The fact that #Indranagarkagunda was trending was just because we haven’t seen Rahul Dravid in this avatar earlier. In the latest ad, we see Kumar Sanu selling insurance as well.
The ads have truly captivated the nation and have lead to a very distinct uptick in the number of users who have downloaded the app and not to mention the share of voice across all the digital platforms that they had over the past couple of months.

Read the full article at http://thedailyvanilla.com/2021/04/27/90-of-cred-users-dont-have-a-credit-card/