Digital Payments Startup Innoviti Raises $18 Mn From SBI-FMO Fund, Others

Digital payments solutions company, Innoviti Payment Solutions has raised $18.5 Mn (INR 120 Cr) Series B funding led by Singapore-based SBI-FMO Fund. The round also saw participation from Bessemer Venture Partners and existing investor Catamaran Ventures.

Suramya Gupta, Fund Manager, SBI-FMO Fund said, “We are excited to partner with Innoviti as we jointly build the leading digital payments platform in India. Innoviti is a company focussed on developing unique solutions for the Indian payments context and we like companies with the ability to create IP. We believe these solutions will also be valuable to other countries in Asia and we will work with Innoviti to extend our network in this region to them.”

Founded by Rajeev Agrawal, an IIT Bombay alumnus, Innoviti provides digital payments solutions which facilitate SME Lending. On one hand, these solutions help businesses enhance sales by providing their customers with access to loans from multiple lenders when they are paying for their purchase. On the other, they help businesses in reducing the cost of processing digital payments by automating the manual processes used by them.

With its indigenous payments platform, Innoviti has delivered differentiated solutions for digital payments automation, consumer credit distribution, and SME lending. An official statement claims that Innoviti processes over $3 Bn (INR 20,000 Cr) of payment transactions annually including about $155 Mn (INR 1000 Cr) of credit.

“A rapidly growing Indian economy with fledgeling infrastructure needs a different approach to the delivery of payment solutions. An approach that first focusses on making every transaction happen, and happens fast. Innoviti, with its extensive experience and relationships in the payments space, has embarked on the journey of delivering this simple promise of speed and reliability in payments,” said Rajeev Agrawal, CEO, Innoviti.

Innoviti’s platform SME Lending – provides a frictionless process for addressing the short-term working capital requirements of small businesses. The platform enables loans as small as INR 30,000 for periods as short as 15 days.

As per an official statement, SME Lending connects lenders to SMEs and processes more than 150,000 loans annually for over 30,000 businesses.

The current round of funding will be used to aggressively market its uniPAY Next digital payments platform experience, to acquire customers. Apart from this, the funds will be used for expansion of the platform to provide working capital loans to kirana stores and brand franchises. The startup will also look to expand the product to address payment and lending issues beyond retail to other businesses across the supply chain.

Innoviti’s payment platform clientele includes Reliance Retail, Titan, Landmark Group, INOX, Indigo, Walmart, and several others. Banks such as HDFC, ICICI, Axis, SBI, Standard Chartered, Kotak, and Citibank use the platform to access customers for processing their payments and loans distribution.

Earlier in 2015, Catamaran Ventures had invested $5 Mn in Innoviti. The round also saw the participation from Canada-based New India Investment Corporation.

As per a Nasscom-KPMG report, the Indian fintech software market is forecasted to touch $2.4 Bn by 2020, from the current $1.2 Bn. Most of the market is driven by the lending and insurance verticals. In June 2017, Ahmedabad-headquartered SME lending startup Lendingkart Finance Limited raised about $7.7 Mn (INR 50 CR) debt funding from YES Bank. Other startups in the SME lending segment that compete with Innoviti include Indifi, Quikrupee, SMEcorner, Biz2credit, smehelpline, and smegetmoney.