BharatPe, a QR code-based payment app for offline retailers and businesses, has secured $50 million (approx ₹360 crore) funding in a round led by Ribbit Capital and Steadview Capital.
Other investors such as Sequoia Capital, Beenext Capital and Insight Partners also participated in the round.
Ashneer Grover, co-founder at BharatPe, said, “We plan to deploy these funds to aggressively expand our current merchant base of 1.45 million to over 5 million within the next one year and fulfil the capital requirements of the under-served offline merchants in India by lending to them.”
With this new round, the Delhi-based company’s total funding stands at $68 million.
BharatPe was founded by Ashneer Grover and Shashvat Nakrani in 2018. It is a merchant focused payments and lending platform that offers merchants a single interface for all existing UPI apps such as PayTM, PhonePe, Google Pay, BHIM, Mobikwik, Freecharge, among 100 other UPI transaction applications.
The platform also enables merchants to track their transactions and settlements, manage sales record and also earn periodic cashbacks.
Currently, the platform is operative in 13 Indian cities. With 7 Lakh active merchant’s base, the company aims to become the utility app for all business needs for over 1 crore retail merchants.
Also, the company claims to have achieved $1 billion annual TPV and facilitates over 18 million UPI transactions monthly.
“BharatPe facilitates 10% of overall UPI merchant transactions in the country and accounts for 1% of overall UPI,” Grover added.
Furthermore, a Credit Suisse report shows that the Indian digital payment sector is expected to grow five-fold and reach $1 Tn by 2023.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) recorded 822.29 Mn UPI transactions in July, which is 8.97% more than the transaction volume in June.
Other players that follows the similar route as BharatPe include PayUMoney, Razorpay, Benow, deAzzle, Instamojo, Citrus, among many more.