MasterCard Invests In Razorpay; Duo To Collaborate in Accelerating Mobile Payments Among SMEs

Online payment gateway Razorpay is collaborating with MasterCard to speed up the adoption of online and mobile payments among small businesses in India. As part of the collaboration, MasterCard has also invested an undisclosed amount in Razorpay. Additionally, Razorpay has integrated the MasterCard Payment Gateway to enable merchants and card issuers to authenticate each other prior to the authorisation of a transaction.

Harshil Mathur, CEO of Razorpay, stated, “This marks a new chapter in the growth story of Razorpay. Being backed by a global powerhouse like MasterCard will give us added credibility to our cutting edge technology which is miles ahead of competition. Over the course of the past few months, we’ve been able to convert many of our competitors’ clients because of the ease in transacting with our platforms. We want to build on the idea of providing simplified payment solutions to the consumers. With support from MasterCard alongside other investors, we’re on our path to build the gold standard of payments in India.”

Razorpay has been working with the MasterCard Start Path programme since 2015. The programme is a global effort to support startups developing the next generation of commerce and fintech technologies – to get support in technology enhancements and to benefit from the company’s global risk and fraud expertise. The startup has over 5000 merchants including the likes of Papa John’s, Knowlarity, Chai Point, Nestaway and Eatfresh, among others.

Till date, it has raised a total capital of $11.5 Mn from a bunch of investors like Tiger Global, Matrix Partners and Y Combinator. The last round was in October 2015, wherein it raised $9 Mn from Tiger Global and Matrix Partners. The startup, which was incubated at Silicon Valley’s based startup accelerator Y Combinator, had earlier raised $2.5 Mn (INR 16 Cr) in seed funding from Matrix Partners, Y Combinator and 33 other angel investors, including the founders of InMobi, Snapdeal, Freecharge and the likes of Punit Soni, Ram Shriram and Justin Kan.

The payments sector is seeing a lot of investor interest and activity in recent times. The approval of payments bank licences to companies such as Paytm, Airtel, etc., is expected to accelerate the adoption of digital payments by people. Hence, many new players, including international ones, are entering the market to tap this growth. Notable among them are Singapore-based multi-language payment gateway Telr and New York-based cross-border payments platform Payoneer.

In May, Gurgaon-based mobile wallet company MobiKwik had raised an undisclosed amount of funding led by Japan’s GMO Payment Gateway and Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company MediaTek. Yesterday, online payment gateway CitrusPay has launched a contextual commerce platform called  Sellfie. It will enable individuals and small businesses to sell and collect payments on social networks and instant messengers using buy buttons, payment links and chat bots.

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