SME-focussed Rupifi secures $25 mn in round led by Bessemer, Tiger Global

Rupifi Technologies Pvt Ltd, which operates a B2B (business-to-business) BNPL (buy-now-pay-later) platform for micro, small and medium enterprises, has raised $25 million (Rs 185.77 crore) as a part of its Series A funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Tiger Global Management.    

Existing Investors Quona Capital and Ankur Capital also participated in this round, along with Better Capital.   

The platform, which also offers small medium enterprises (SME)-focussed commercial card products, will use the funds to build an omnichannel mobile-first B2B payments solutions for its users, according to the company’s Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Anubhav Jain.   

“Our SME focused Commercial Card provides SMEs flexibility to manage expenses without any cost for shorter periods. With the recent round of funding, we are now moving towards building the complete B2B checkout product for marketplaces and omnichannel mobile-first B2B Payments solutions for merchants, distributors and sellers,” said Jain.   

Rupifi , founded in 2020 by Anubhav Jain, Ankit Singh and Jawaid Iqbal had raised $4.1 million in a pre-Series A round in March last year. Quona Capital, Ankur Capital along with Flipkart Co-Founder Binny Bansal had participated in the funding round. The company is also backed by other angel investors including Cred’s Kunal Shah and BharatPe’s Ashneer Grover. Recently, the company raised venture debt from Trifecta Capital.

The company is betting on penetration of credit in the B2B payments ecosystem, which further got a fillip due to digitisation in the past few years, it said.

Rupifi claims it has recorded a 50% month-on-month growth in loan disbursals in the last 12 months and has covered more than 50,000 SMEs.  

“We understand that globally B2B Payments are broken and largely manual. In the $1 trillion B2B commerce and payments space in India, Rupifi has demonstrated rapid growth and proven product leadership”, said John Curtius, Partner, Tiger Global.

Meanwhile, Bessemer Venture Partners’ investment in Rupifi comes a month after two senior executives of the firm had said in an interaction that the venture capital (VC) firm had raised a new dedicated India fund with a corpus of $220 million, the first such country specific ever raised by the firm. Vishal Gupta, Managing Director, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and Anant Vidur Puri, Partner at the VC firm has said that the fund will focus primarily on early-stage investments.

“We are excited to back Rupifi and Anubhav in their mission to simplify B2B payments including BNPL for B2B marketplace and smaller merchants in a seamless way. B2B Payments and B2B Credit are large problems with Technology being the future to solve these and Rupifi team is building around that keeping the SMEs at the core,” Gupta said.