Chillr, a peer-to-peer payments app, which claims to be India’s first multi-bank instant payment app, has closed its Series A funding round with $7 million raised from Blume Ventures, Uniqorn Ventures, Sequoia Capital and others.
The company will use a part of the raised funds to acquire customers and merchants and the rest of the money will be utilized to strengthen its technology and team.
We earlier reported that the company had raised $6 million in Series A round from Sequoia Capital. However, the company didn’t closed the funding round and was looking to raise another $1-1.5 million.
Founded in December 2014 by Sony Joy, the Chillr app allows users to transfer money to any contact in their phone book. It is directly linked to the customer’s bank account and, hence, eliminates the need for a prepaid wallet. All transactions are authenticated by a four-digit MPIN issued by the bank.
The mobile application has already seen a staggering 350,000 installs, with over 200,000 customers already linking their bank accounts with the application to both make and receive payments.
Currently, it allows users to HDFC Bank and Bank of Baroda to send and receive money, while the users of every other bank can only receive money. It claims to be eliminating the need for an OTP or remembering the account number and passwords.
It claims that it allow users to send money to others near them, without knowing their phone number. As of now, it does not charge end-user or the bank for the transaction but the banks are free to charge users on transactions.
With Chillr, even India’s rural and semi-urban populace could easily transfer funds to their relatives and known, without going through the hassle of cheques, DDs or even online banking.
Chillr is claiming to be already processing close to 5000 transactions a day, amounting to 50 lacs a day. The startup is now looking to reach a whopping 100K transactions a day by the end of this year.
The major players in the peer-to-peer payments market include PayTM, Oxigen Wallet, MobiKwik Wallet, iKaaz’s MOWA, etc.
We have contacted Chillr for more information regarding this development. We will update this article once we get reply from them.
