Two Indian fintech startups secure fresh funding to grow operations

fintech startups Razorpay — Image by eamesBot | Bigstockphoto

Two Indian startups operating in the growing financial tech or fintech space have received fresh funding from separate investors to grow their respective businesses.

Bangalore-based Razorpay, which is a full-stack financial services provider to Indian businesses, has secured investment from Salesforce Ventures, the venture capital arm of the American customer relationship management firm.

The funding size wasn’t shared with the media. This was Salesforce Ventures’ second investment in the Indian startup ecosystem this year.

Razorpay was valued at $3 billion in a financing round in April this year when it raised a $160 million Series E round led by Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC.

The latest deal now values the startup at more than $3 billion, a little over the valuation sought by the company in April. The startup said that the “strategic investment” will help it use Salesforce’s network to expand to Southeast Asia.

Harshil Mathur, chief executive and co-founder, Razorpay, said that the funding will also help the startup accelerate adoption and financial growth of underserved small businesses in the next 12 months, and in expanding and integrating the payments and banking platforms. “We will build new products and deliver this experience to businesses in Southeast Asian countries, too.”

Arundhati Bhattacharya, CEO of Salesforce India said that the journey towards a ‘less-cash’ economy has been accelerated with the pandemic. “The rapid growth in digital payments over the last year has opened doors for technology innovation and Razorpay has been emerging as the company of choice for a lot of e-commerce businesses.”

Razorpay had previously launched a neobanking platform to issue corporate credit cards.

On the other hand, FloBiz, which is also a neobank for small and medium businesses (SMBs), has raised $31 million in Series B round led by Sequoia Capital India, Think Investments and its existing investors Elevation Capital & Beenext.

In an official statement, FloBiz said that fresh capital will be deployed for team expansion, product development and scaling distribution to serve more businesses. It is also based in Bangalore, which is called India’s own Silicon Valley.

FloBiz is preparing to foray into financial services and said that the funding will help it focus on building additional technical capabilities within the organisation. The funding round saw participation from prominent angel investors like Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CRED founder Kunal Shah, Pine Lab’s Amrish Rau and HalloApp’s Neeraj Arora among others.

“This raise will help us accelerate projects which have been in the works up till now – building personalisable modules & features into myBillBook, diversifying core product offerings and preparing to roll out financial services,” Rahul Raj, Co-founder & CEO of FloBiz said in a statement.

FloBiz’s myBillBook is the flagship product, which helps SMB owners digitise invoicing, streamline business accounting and automate workflows of their enterprises. “With over a million monthly active users, SMBs now record over $1 billion worth of transactions on myBillBook every month,” the statement said.