Juspay Technologies, a frictionless digital payments startup, has secured $60 million in a Series C funding round backed by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 alongside existing investors VEF and Wellington Management participating in the round. Avendus Capital acted as the advisor for the fintech startup in this round.
Although SoftBank alone infused $50 million to the fresh round, with the remaining funds coming from JusPay’s existing investors VEF and Wellington Management. The Bengaluru-based startup has raised a total of $87 million since its inception in 2021. While the company did not share any details of its valuation in the statement, reports suggest that Juspay is valued between the range of $400 million to $500 million.
The fresh infusion of capital will be used for technological and product development by the company. The proceeds will also allow Juspay to scale its operations to enter adjacent sectors including credit as well as to focus on overseas expansion.
Commenting on the fundraise Vimal Kumar, the founder & CEO of Juspay in a statement said, “We believe in ecosystem innovations like UPI and OCEN (Open Credit Enablement Network) and have built a deep value-driven culture to support such initiatives. This funding will help us scale up our mission in India and expand globally.”
This is SoftBank’s second investment in an Indian payments company, following the IPO of its portfolio company Paytm last month, which had a lackluster debut on the stock exchanges. Noida-based Paytm has secured around $1.6 billion investment from SoftBank. The Japanese conglomerate has injected almost $3.2 billion across different startups in India which include Flipkart, Meesho, Swiggy, Ola Electric, and Unacademy this year, as part of $8.3 billion in deals.
Juspay, founded in 2012 by Vimal Kumar, provides a technological platform that streamlines payment gateways to offer merchants an end-to-end, enterprise-grade payment infrastructure. Justpay Safe, a payment browser, Express Checkout, a payments orchestration platform, HyperSDK, a payments SDK (software development kit), and a UPI option are some of the company’s offerings.
Juspay claims to handle more than 11 million transactions per day and has a long list of distinguished customers, including Amazon, BigBasket, Flipkart, CRED, PharmEasy, and Swiggy. Juspay faces stiff competes in the payment gateway space with companies such as Prosus-backed BillDesk, CCAvenue, fintech unicorn Razorpay, and PayU, among others. To comply with the Reserve Bank of India’s guidelines for payment aggregators and payment gateways, the startup has also launched a product that allows merchants to tokenize customer card details.
According to an analysis, the fintech sector ranked second in terms of capital this year, with $7.4 billion invested. PineLabs, Jupiter, Razorpay, and Zest Money all garnered larger cheques in 2021, as Indians transitioned more towards digital payments. The fintech sector saw a record of 260 deals from 2021 to December 4, 2021, mainly to growth factors which include increased internet penetration as well as the covid pandemic.
