The COVID-19 pandemic, though hurtful for most small and medium, specially traditional businesses, hasn’t dampened the investment spirits in India’s digital ecosystem. That high spirit is getting reflected today, as payments processing upstart Razorpay is announcing a $100 million Series D round, that has propelled the company to a unicorn status. The round is led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and existing investor Sequoia Capital.
Choo Yong Cheen, Chief Investment Officer at GIC said, “India has made significant strides in establishing a digital payments ecosystem and Razorpay has established itself as a clear leader, with its strong focus on customer experience and product innovation. GIC has a long track record of partnering with leading fintech companies globally and is delighted to partner with Razorpay in its journey to transform payments and banking.”
Other investors who participated in the $100 million funding round include Ribbit Capital, Tiger Global, Y Combinator, and Matrix Partners. The latest investments bring Razorpay’s total fundings raised to date to $206.5 million.
With the new funds coming in, Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur says that the startup will focus on growing its nascent neo-banking domain, as its payment gateway service is already the fastest growing business vertical does not need any additional cash infusion. According to Mathur, the company will invest in its RazorpayX and Razorpay Capital businesses with an aim to designate about 35% of Razorpay’s revenues from these two entities alone by the end of March next year.
RazorpayX is a business banking platform offered by Razorpay. It allows the clients to manage their employee payrolls, and other business-related payments more efficiently. Currently, it has over 10,000 businesses using the platform. With new investments, Razorpay looks to add vendor management, invoice management, tax payment, and expense management to the RazorpayX platform. On the other hand, Razorpay Capital is a platform that provides loans to small or medium-sized firms. Razorpay Capital provides loans along with five non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) and two banks as its partners.
Mathur told ET, “Both RazorpayX and Razorpay Capital have seen very good traction. The first focus area is to go deeper and build more products around these. The payments business is almost breaking even, and that does not require that much funding. We need to put more fuel into the fire, and that’s where a significant portion of the capital will go towards.”
Mathur said the startup is also going to hire an additional 500 in its growth, product and technology teams. The company is also aiming to acquire new upcoming startups but has not made a decision on it yet. “It is too early to speak on which startups we are looking to acquire since these are still in the discussion phase. But we continue to look at inorganic avenues of growth through opportunistic acquisitions,” said Mathur. Razorpay had recently acquired Thirdwatch, a startup that develops fraud prevention platforms in the fintech domain.
Razorpay, which was started as a payment solutions company back in 2014 by Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar from IIT Roorkee, is a payment solutions platform that provides services such as payment gateways, payment links, payment buttons, business banking (RazorpayX) and lending service (Razorpay Capital). It competes with other major Indian payment solutions companies such as Prosus Ventures’ PayU and Pine Labs.
It caters to a pool of well known digital platforms with its payments services which include, Oyo, Tokopedia, Zomato and Swiggy, Byju’s, Gojek, Zilingo, Truecaller, Yatra and Goibibo, and telecom giant Airtel.
