Amid growing investor interest in India’s exponentially growing fintech sector, FTCash, a mobile payments platform for micro merchants in India, today announced that it has raised ₹1 Crore in a pre-series A funding from the IvyCamp platform. IvyCap Ventures is a lead investor in this round.
This fresh round is primarily for aggressive customer and merchant acquisition along with product development.
Founded in late 2014, FTCash is an early mover in this space and focuses on the long tail of micro-merchants. It enables cashless transactions and allows the merchants / customers to use multiple payment options – wallets, cards, net banking etc., under one platform. The core team at FTCash has strong capabilities across analytics, business alliances, financial strategy consulting and operations.
The startup operates two different domains — one for customers which offers capabilities like digital payments, rewards and cashbacks, options to donate to a cause among others. While the merchant side of the platform helps small and medium businesses with customer management, invoicing, payment reception among other.
Sanjeev Chandak, Co-founder and CEO of FTCash said,
Small merchants have traditionally been outside the financial ecosystem with over 80% using cash & hence limiting their ability to get loans from banks. FTCash enables electronic payment acceptance using their existing bank account and a basic mobile phone. In IvyCap, we found a perfect partner to enable faster merchant acquisition and product development to take advantage of this massive opportunity.
IvyCap, the platform via which FTCash secured this fresh round is an initiative of IvyCap Ventures, in a bid to implement India’s first Unified Innovation and Entrepreneurship Platform, leveraging the Global Alumni Networks (including IITs, IIMs, BITs and ISB) across the premier educational institutions to connect and create value for entrepreneurs and innovators.
The platform is an ecosystem connecting Startups, Innovators, Mentors, Institutes, Corporates, Investors, and Incubators which cross leverages resources to support and grow the entrepreneurial space in India. We not only support entrepreneurs but actually help to build new entrepreneurs, and enable innovators to transform their innovative ideas into real value.
Vikram Gupta, Founder and Managing Partner of IvyCap Ventures said,
We got connected with FTCash through the IvyCamp platform and found value in the strong & relevant credentials of the founding team, the untapped micro merchants segment and the value proposition of seamless cashless transactions via all possible payments sources through just an app. This is amongst the first few investments of IvyCap Ventures Trust Fund II and forms part of our early stage strategy, through which we have allocated INR 60 Cr. for early stage investments via the IvyCamp platform.
