Instarem, a Singapore-headquartered cross-border payments company founded by Indian-origin entrepreneur Prajit Nanu, has raised $13 million in a Series B funding round led by Chinese venture capital firm GSR Ventures, a company statement said.
SBI-FMO Ventures, Vertex Ventures, Fullerton Financial Holdings, and Global Founders Capital (GFC) also participated in the round, the statement added.
As part of the deal, Jefferson Chen, partner at GSR Ventures, will join the Instarem board.
Nanu, who hails from Mumbai, along with Michael Bermingham co-founded Instarem in 2014. Prior to starting up, Nanu was director of global business development at financial services firm TMF Group and has also served as vice president of sales at business process management firm WNS Global Services.
Instarem will use the fresh funds to build its global payment infrastructure, which the company claims has “grown 8x in volumes since its March 2016 funding.†The company will also use the investment to increase its employee strength at its Mumbai office, where most of the company’s teams are based.
Earlier, Instarem had raised $500,000 in initial capital from Global Founders Capital, followed by $5 million in 2016 led by Vertex Ventures, the venture capital arm of Temasek, Fullerton Financial Holding and Global Founders Capital.
Instarem acts as a payment infrastructure platform that can be used by small and mid-sized banks, payment processors, corporates and individuals to send money across borders at a “fraction of the cost.â€
"In fact, the World Bank has consistently listed Instarem as one of the most cost-efficient money transfer platforms across many corridors from Australia and Singapore. Instarem currently holds 8% market share for users remitting to India from Australia,†the company said.
By the start of Q4 2017, the startup said it will be available across all markets in Europe and the US, in addition to Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Canada.
Of late, the fin-tech space has been the darling of investors, who are writing cheques generously to place their bets on the sunshine sector.
A recent VCCircle analysis showed that since the beginning of the year, at least 25 fin-tech startups have raised venture funding. The inflows have been well-distributed across the broader fintech space—while digital wallet firm Paytm may have got the biggest slice of the funding pie, raising a whopping $1.4 billion from SoftBank, online lending and payment gateway startups also elicited considerable interest from investors.