SUMMARY
Existing investor Matrix also participated
Online payment gateway Razorpay has raised $9 Mn (INR 58 Cr) in a round led by Tiger Global. The round also saw participation of Matrix Partners. The funds will be used to further build its product and enter other segments of the payment industry.
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 Ram Shriram, an early Google investor; Jeff Huber, senior vice president at GoogleX; Justin Kan, a partner at Y Combinator, Kunal Bahl & Rohit Bansal (Snapdeal founders), Punit Soni (Flipkart CPO), Abhay Singhal, Amit Gupta & Naveen Tewari (Inmobi founders), Kunal Shah & Sandeep Tandon (Freecharge founders), Bill Gajda (SVP, Global Head of Innovation, Visa). This brings the total amount raised by the startup to $11.5 Mn.
Razorpay validates internet payments via credit or debit cards, net banking and digital wallets from the end customers in real time. The firm, with a 15-member team, relocated from Jaipur to Bangalore a few months ago. Since its launch in March this year, it has seen over 1,800 merchants use its platform. The company now aims to surpass the figure of 5,000 merchants by the end of this year. Few of its customers include RoadRunnr, Lookup, Gozefo, Innerchef, Teen Patti Gold, LocalOye, UrbanPiper, Instafeez, Neostencil, Chai Point and Sattviko.
Harshil Mathur, co-founder, Razorpay, said, “We believe that the online payments infrastructure in India has not developed at the same pace as the rest of the e-commerce and m-commerce ecosystem. The fact that we have been backed by marquee investors, e-commerce entrepreneurs with amazing track record and other leaders in the payments ecosystem has reinforced our belief that the Indian payment space was in much need of a technology-focused solution. We intend to deploy the funds for scaling up the product, building the right team and for strategic forays into the online payments industry.”
The payments sector is seeing a lot of investor interest and activity in recent times. Last month, Paytm, another big player in this segment reportedly raised $680 Mn from Chinese ecommerce giant, Alibaba Group Holding for a 20% stake. This month, Mumbai based payment solutions company, Citrus Payment Solutions, has raised about $25 Mn from a group of new and existing investors. At around the same time, Citrus Pay also acquired Bangalore-based payment platform Zwitch for an undisclosed amount.
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