POS Provider Innoviti Eyes Expansion With $11.5 Mn Debt Funding

Bengaluru-based digital payments solutions company Innoviti has raised $11.5 Mn (INR 80 Cr) in a fresh debt funding round from Trifecta Capital and a bunch of non-banking finance companies (NBFCs).

The NR Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures-backed startup is looking to use the fresh funds to expand operations, strengthen the technology platform to ensure smooth card payments and hire additional staff.

With INR 30 Cr from Trifecta and INR 50 Cr from NBFCs, Innoviti is looking to raise funds without having to dilute the shares of the existing shareholders.

Founded in 2002, Innoviti deploys point of sale (PoS) terminals and processes card payments for retailers. The company claims to have turned its core enterprise business of processing card payments for organised retailers cash positive. It has a network of more than 11,000 retail outlets spread over 850 cities in India.

In an earlier conversation with Inc42, Innoviti CEO Rajeev Agrawal said that the company has disbursed about 160K (number of) loans to over 30,000 small merchants pan India. Also, the yearly disbursement volume of SME lending for the company ranges from $62.3 Mn (INR 400 Cr) – $78 Mn (INR 500 Cr).

With the venture debt funding, Agrawal intends to experiment with new product lines and scale up business operations by deploying more PoS terminals.

Innoviti maintains that its flagship product Unipay processes over $3 Bn of annual transaction volume through more that 50K POS terminals across India. With a commitment of $2.9 Mn, Innoviti had introduced EMI Next in July 2018, aimed at enabling merchants, brands and lenders to design specific and flexible EMI products for consumers to suit their requirements.

Aakash Goel, partner, Trifecta Capital said, “They need to offer additional features like dynamic switching across current accounts of merchants, instant processing of transactions, same-day settlements, integrate billing with PoS. That is where the money is set to be made.”

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.

India currently houses more than 500 fintech startups. Other Indian fintech startups making mark in this space include Faircent, Kissht, Simpl, FTCash, Rubique, EarlySalary, MoneyTap, and Instamojo, among others. Recently, POS provider Mswipe raised $31.5 Mn to strengthen its game in the POS industry.

The Indian POS terminal market is pegged to reach $450 Mn at a CAGR of over 10% from 2017 to 2024. The fintech sector is forecasted to cross $2.4 Bn by 2020, according to KPMG and NASSCOM report.