Rupifi Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which offers embedded lending solutions to business-to-business (B2B) marketplaces, has raised venture debt from Trifecta Capital, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.
The company will use the funds to scale its existing B2B credit and payments products offered to small businesses transacting on B2B marketplaces, the company said. Part of the capital will also be deployed to scale its partnerships with financial institutions, and enhance its market portfolio, it added.
“We have always believed in a balanced mix of equity and debt for Rupifi’s growth and expansion,” said Anubhav Jain, Co-Founder and CEO of Rupifi.
Earlier in October, Rupifi had raised $1 million (Rs 7.4 crore) in a mix of venture debt round from Alteria Capital and Gokul Rajaram, board member of Coinbase and Pinterest. In March this year, it raised $4.1 million (around Rs 30 crore) in a pre-Series A round led by fintech and inclusion-focused Quona Capital. In March 2020, the company had raised capital in its pre-seed funding round from BharatPe founder Ashneer Grover, Cred and Freecharge founder Kunal Shah, and Livspace founder Ramakant Sharma.
“Rupifi sits at the intersection of SaaS, payments and credit and we are glad to partner with them in their goal towards disrupting B2B payments and credit in India. Embedded finance has been a focus for us, and we are big believers in Rupifi’s business model especially with the recent growth and digitisation of B2B commerce,” said Rahul Khanna, co-founder and managing partner at Trifecta Capital.
Last month, Trifecta Capital raised Rs 750 crore ($100 million) as part of its first close of its third venture debt fund. It has backed over 70 companies including Bigbasket, PharmEasy, Cars24, Vedantu, Infra.Market, ShareChat, and Dailyhunt.
Rupifi was founded in 2020 by Jain, Ankit Singh and Jawaid Iqbal. Jain had previously co-founded financial technology startup Qbera, while Singh had co-founded Truckmandi. Iqbal, meanwhile, has worked with companies such as Google.
The company is focussed on addressing the credit needs of small businesses. It partners with aggregators and connects them with lenders. Credit is then issued to businesses that use these aggregators to sell their products and services.
Rupifi generates revenue by earning a commission from every deal done through its platform. The company last year had said that it is also ready to take around 5% of the loans issued to small businesses on its books, which will help the company gain exposure to credit underwriting and also provide it a revenue stream through interest payments. Rupifi said companies such as Open, Indifi and Capital Float are its peers in the space.
“We have seen a very strong growth momentum in the adoption of our B2B credit products over the past few months. Our embedded B2B BNPL (buy now pay later) product is currently integrated with category leading B2B marketplaces across industries including FMCG, grocery or kirana, pharma, medical equipment, fashion, food/hotel retail chains and agriculture,” said Jain.
The company also recently launched commercial cards that enables easy working capital for small businesses and helps them manage their purchases without being concerned about short term liquidity or cash flow issues. Jain also said that the company has a couple of B2B payments and credit products in pipeline through which it aims to power digital B2B transactions for small businesses across use cases.
