Easebuzz Pvt Ltd, a Mumbai-based payments infrastructure startup, has raised close to $4 million in funding as part of its seed round led by 8i Ventures, Varanium Capital, and Guild Capital. Former Citrus Pay founders Amrish Rau and Jitendra Gupta also participated in the round.
According to the company, the fresh funding will be used to strengthen the product team, enhance sales and marketing efforts and offer more payment-based application programming interface (APIs) to small and mid-sized enterprises.
Three-year-old Easebuzz provides payments infrastructure that powers digital collections and payments for Indian small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
“From inception, our product DNA was designed around removing friction out of every collection touch-point for an Indian SME. This mind-set has allowed us to emerge as the most preferred payment partner today for our MSME customers. This current financing round will help us accelerate our mission of powering digital collections and payments for every retail business in India,” said Rohit Prasad, managing director at Easebuzz.
Over the past year, the company claims to have seen its revenues and gross transaction value on its platform grow 12 times.
“We are delighted to be the first institutional investors in Easebuzz along with Varanium Capital and Guild Capital. India’s $800B retail economy is going hyper-digital and Easebuzz is the best-positioned payments player to take advantage of this massive market opportunity,” said Vikram Chachra, founding partner at 8i Ventures.
Easebuzz is now looking to develop a new suite of services around digital remittances and collections for SMEs on its platform.
“Growing digitisation of merchants, driven by lockdowns and government policies favouring financial inclusion have triggered an inflection point for the digital payment ecosystem in India. We are happy to partner with Easebuzz and believe that its strong team and SME focus will leverage this trend to accelerate the growth of online- driven businesses in India,” said Apoorv Gautam, India head and chief operating officer of Guild Capital.
According to a research report by RedSeer Consulting, the payment gateway aggregator market in India is expected to grow to about Rs22.6 trillion in transaction worth by FY25 from the current Rs9.5 trillion.
