Mastercard Invests In Fintech Unicorn Zeta, Will Jointly Launch Credit Cards

Fintech unicorn, Zeta, has raised $30 Mn in a fresh round of strategic funding from payments giant, MasterCard, and a clutch of other investors.

With this, Zeta’s total valuation has now soared to over $1.5 Bn

The strategic investment is part of MasterCard’s five-year partnership with Zeta. As part of the deal, the two parties will jointly launch credit cards on Zeta’s credit processing stack.

The fresh round of funding will enable Zeta to evolve its platform into a single-vendor system that will help streamline its operations. This will also allow issuers to launch flexible and highly customisable card programs faster. 

The deal will also enable Zeta to leverage Mastercard’s fraud prevention tools and loyalty solutions for its platform. 

Zeta CEO and cofounder, Bhavin Turakhia said, “With Zeta’s next-gen credit card processing platform, we are fundamentally rewiring how issuers launch credit card programs by offering new paradigms over legacy mainframe systems…In Mastercard, we have a partner that is committed to undertake this journey with us and truly believes in this mission.”

Founded in 2015 by Bhavin Turakhia and Ramki Gaddipati, Zeta offers cloud-native neo-banking platform for the issuance of credit, debit and prepaid products. It also provides digitised solutions to enterprises such as automated cafeteria billing and more. 

Headquartered in Bengaluru, Zeta serves big fintech firms and banks including Axis Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Yes Bank, Induslnd Bank, and HDFC Bank.

Zeta has more than 1,300 employees across US, UK, Middle East, and Asia. The startup claims to have served eight issuers and 30 fintech firms. In total, Zeta says that it has issued more than 10 Mn cards.

The startup had previously raised $250 Mn in a Series C round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in May last year. The funding round had catapulted the startup into the unicorn club.

Meanwhile, the startup continues to aim for higher ground. Turakhia was quoted by Moneycontrol as saying that,“Our objective is to jointly power 30 to 40 million credit cards in the next five years on our stack. We are looking to process Total Payment Volumes (TPV) worth around $60 billion through our system.”

Meanwhile,  it is pertinent to note that the partnership between the two companies goes as far back as 2018 when the startup had joined the payment giant’s global startup engagement program. 

Add to this, Zeta had recently joined Mastercard’s partner network – Engage. This enabled Zeta to gain access to the Mastercard network to bundle products that provide instant digital card issuance, provisioning, and usage.

Barely days ago, Bengaluru-based neobanking platform, Niyo, had announced that it raised $100 Mn as a part of its new funding round led by Accel and Lightrock India. 

In early February too, Y Combinator-backed corporate expense management platform Karbon Card too had raised $15 Mn in a Series A round led by Olive Tree Capital, Harmony and Avenir Growth Capital. 

MasterCard’s renewed interest in the startup comes amid an ongoing tussle between payment giants and Indian governments. In November last year, Visa had taken a dig at the Indian government, accusing it of favouring the state-backed RuPay. MasterCard too had complained to the U.S government back in 2018 regarding such concerns.

WIth Indian government amping up the investment in RuPay, it looks like MasterCard is looking for a way to better play the odds against it. And the payments giant definitely doesn’t want to miss out on the Indian fintech sector.