Sykdo Bags $5 Mn To Streamline Cross-Border Online Payments For Small Businesses

Cross-border payment startup Skydo has secured $5 Mn (around INR 41 Cr) in its Pre-Series A funding round led by existing backer Elevation Capital, along with a participation from a host of undisclosed angel investors.

The Bengaluru-based startup plans to deploy the fresh capital in scaling its operations and strengthening risk monitoring and compliance stacks. Besides, the startup aims to expand globally by acquiring payment licenses across international markets with the fresh infusion.

As per the company, this is the second equity investment, after it raised $5 Mn in its first institutional round from Elevation Capital back in 2022.

Founded by Movin Jain and Srivatsan Sridhar in 2022, Skydo is a cross-border payment startup which enables businesses to open international accounts (collection accounts) with the help of its global banking partners. It also claims to reduce forex charges for businesses by more than 50%. 

This comes at a time when Skydo is awaiting payment aggregator cross-border license from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), which will help the company to offer domestic merchant payment services too.

The startup currently claims to process payments for over 6,000 Indian small and midsize businesses (SMB).

The development comes at a time when cross-border payment startups in India have been seeing a lot of activities around funding and licensing.

For instance,last month, fintech startup BillDesk, Amazon Pay India, and global payments major Adyen recently received the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) approval to operate as cross-border payment aggregators.

This also comes at the heart of Bengaluru-based fintech startup Cashfree Payments becoming the first entity to receive Payment Aggregator Cross Border (PA-CB) licence from the RBI. The license will enable the startup to process cross-border online transactions for the import and export of goods and services. 

In October last year, cross-border fintech platform HiWi raised INR 7.25 Cr in a Pre-Seed funding round led by Unicorn India Ventures and the Unmaj Group Family Office.

As per Inc42 report, the Indian fintech space is expected to be a $2.1 Tn market opportunity by 2030. 

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