BharatPe Records $479 Mn In Merchant UPI Transaction Value, Overtakes Google Pay

Delhi-based digital payments platform BharatPe, on Tuesday (December 8), announced that it has recorded 6.15 Cr merchant UPI transactions worth INR 3,334 Cr ($479 Mn) in November 2020.

With this, BharatPe claims to have taken over Google to become the third-largest player in the merchant UPI payments. The company claims to have reached an all-time high of 5% market share by transaction and 7% market share by transaction value.

Further, the company claims that the volume of transactions processed by BharatPe last month was greater than the combined UPI P2M (person-to-merchants) transaction volume of Jio, Zomato, Swiggy, CRED, Flipkart, CashFree, IRCTC and MPL.

Commenting on the same, BharatPe’s cofounder and CEO Ashneer Grover said, “The offline retail market is, in order of magnitude, larger than the online/ecommerce market in a country like India and digitising fast. BharatPe’s differentiated financial services proposition focused at the merchant outweighs all other services being targeted by other UPI / VAS players.”

Grover also noted that BharatPe has grown 4x through the pandemic. The company now aims to grow its business 5x in the next two years to cross $30 Bn total payments volume (TPV), added BharatPe’s Group President Suhail Sameer. “We are bullish on lending and aim to disburse loans of US$1 bn to small merchants and kiranas by 2023,” he added.

Launched in 2018 by Ashneer Grover and Shashvat Nakrani, BharatPe is a merchant focused payments platform. It offers merchants a single interface for all existing UPI apps such as Paytm, PhonePe, Google Pay, BHIM, Mobikwik, Freecharge, TrueCaller among 100 other UPI transaction applications.

Currently, BharatPe serves over 50 Lakh merchants across more than 50 cities. It plans to scale up to 65 cities by March 2020.

The company claims to have grown its business 30x in 2019, with an annualised TPV of $7 Bn. The company also claims to have facilitated the disbursement of over INR 500 Cr to its merchants since its launch.

According to the company’s press statement, BharatPe’s POS business grew to $ 2 Bn annualized transaction value in just 3 months posts the launch.

The company has raised $ 142.5 Mn to date, from marquee investors like Beenext, Sequoia, SteadView Capital, Ribbit Capital, Coatue Management LLC, Insight Partners, and Amplo. It had last raised $75 Mn in Series C round led by Coatue Management and Ribbit Capital in February 2020.