Investment in fintech is booming in India, and it is unlike the wobbly boom which the so -called ‘food-“”tech””‘ sector saw last year. This boom is noteworthy, pretty much relevant and in just the right direction. Adding its name to this list is ePaylater. The startup has raised $2 million in its seed round (via TechCircle) from a group of angel investors.
While the company has raised the current round from high net worth individuals, it claims to have received commitment for further funding from the same investors. The company will use the funding for marketing efforts as well as for further development of the product.
Commenting about this, Akshat Saxena, Co-founder, ePayLater, said,
We are a product centric company, which is also our Intellectual property. Bulk of the investment would be into product development. The other share would belong to Marketing and Business development.
The startup was founded in December 2015 by Aurko Bhattacharya, Prasannaa Murlidharan, Uday Somayajula, Shanmunathan Thiagaraja and Akshat Saxena. It gives customers the option to “buy now and pay later” on online portals with just a single click.
The service is available for high-frequency, low-ticket products. In order to generate revenue, the company charges a commission per transaction from the merchant. The customers are billed only after they receive the delivery of the product. Hence, ePaylater’s solution address the trust issues related to online shopping and acts as a good substitute for COD.
In addition, customers also get 14 days to make the payment. During this period, they can make more purchases and bunch them all together to make a single payment. ePaylater’s platform uses complex algorithms to understand the customer’s credit history. It also considers buying patterns on e-commerce platforms (a quintessential aspect these days), digital footprint and device information to assign a credit limit.
Commenting about the market size, Akshat said,
Indian e-commerce is expected to cross $75 Billion by 2020 which would still be less than 10% of the size of overall retail pie. We expect ePayLater to be the preferred payment solution considering that it offers the most exhaustive set of features to customers and merchants alike. We are looking at penetrating the e-commerce space enough before diversifying our portfolio to also include offline payments as well. This gives us a huge headroom and legroom for growth.
Recent startups to have raised significant amount in this space include the likes of CreditVidya, which secured Rs. 13 crore in a funding round from Kalaari Capital. A couple of months ago, Impact Guru received $500,000 in its seed round. During same period, Varthana secured $14 million in Series B round.
