Digital payments firm BharatPe, which services offline retailers and businesses, has raised $15.5 million (around Rs 107 crore) in a Series A round of funding.
US-based investment firm Insight Partners joined existing investors Sequoia Capital and Beenext in the round, BharatPe said in a statement.
The fintech startup, which is owned by Resilient Innovations Pvt. Ltd, said that it will use the fresh capital for scaling up its operations within the next two years.
“The funding will fuel our mission of democratising digital payments for merchants, and make UPI a preferred way to pay,” said Ashneer Grover, chief executive officer and co-founder of BharatPe. UPI, which stands for Unified Payments Interface, is a real-time mobile payments system for inter-bank transactions.
“Over the last few months, we have been able to transform payments for over 6,00,000 merchants in India. BharatPe facilitates 10% of overall UPI merchant transactions in the country and accounts for 1% of overall UPI,” Grover added.
The company had previously raised $2 million in seed funding from Sequoia Capital India and Singapore-based VC firm Beenext last October.
American Express top executive Sanjay Rishi and PayU co-founder Nitin Gupta also contributed to that round.
New investor Insight Partners is a global venture capital and private equity firm investing in high-growth technology and software companies. It had backed
Chennai-based cloud billing solutions provider Chargebee last year.
BharatPe
BharatPe was founded in April last year by Ashneer Grover and Shashvat Nakrani. Prior to setting up BharatPe, Grover led new business at PC Jeweller and was the chief financial officer at online grocery delivery company Grofers in an earlier stint, while Nakrani is an engineering graduate from IIT-Delhi, their LinkedIn profiles show.
Offline retailers can use BharatPe’s app to make digital payments using QR codes via UPI. Merchants can sign up instantly and can start receiving funds in their bank accounts.
BharatPe works closely with partner banks to develop custom application programme interfaces (APIs).
The company competes with wallet firm Paytm, Flipkart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay.
One97 Communications Ltd, the parent company of Paytm, is reportedly raising $1.5-2 billion from its existing investors SoftBank Vision Fund and Alibaba’s financial affiliate Ant Financial.
Last month, PhonePe received $107.7 million (743.50 crore) from its parent amid growing competition in the segment.
