IppoPay, a Chennai-based payment gateway firm backed by Coinbase Global, Better Capital and Blume Founders Fund, has acquired a risk management startup Tutelar for an undisclosed amount.
Tutelar enables AI-based risk-free onboarding, dispute resolutions, KYC fraud detection, transaction fraud detection, mis-selling prevention etc, benefiting not only the principals such as merchants and banks but also the intermediaries such as PAPGs (payment aggregators and payment gateways), issuers and fintechs and payments processors and switch networks.
Tutelar was started by former Aggrepay CEO Pradeep Kumar, who has over 20 years of experience in the payments and risk management space. He has also worked with EBS, which was acquired by Worldline. He has also worked in risk verticals at Axis Bank, HDFC Bank and HSBC. Post the acquisition, Pradeep Kumar will be joining IppoPay as chief risk officer.
“Tutelar was just an idea when Pradeep was speaking with us. We worked together with him to understand the product and how it is designed as our aspiration is to build a full-stack infrastructure offering which is relevant for banks and other large sized non-banking players. KYC and transaction fraud detection and risk management is a very critical problem that RBI, NPCI and the industry at large are trying to address. Addition of Tutelar makes IppoPay an important constituent in the fight against fraud in the payments space," said Mohan K, CEO, IppoPay.
“We wanted to partner with someone who will help us build on this vision and will take this product global. We believe IppoPay is the right home for Tutelar and they have the chops to help us achieve our vision," said Kumar.
With this acquisition, the company plans to enter the payments infrastructure play. “Tutelar is our first and a very important addition to the full-suite infra-stack that IppoPay is building," said Mohan added.
To strengthen its infra piece, the IppoPay recently appointed former Billdesk and HDFC Bank official Atish Shelar as chief operating officer. He joined IppoPay from M2P, a known payments infrastructure company.
In 2019, payments aggregator Razorpay announced its acquisition of Thirdwatch, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup which specializes in real-time fraud prevention using machine learning.