Bengaluru based payments and banking technology company Cashfree has secured $5.5 million in series A funding from a set of investors led by Korea's Smilegate Investment with participation from existing investor Y Combinator. Notable investors like George Osborne, former Finance Minister of UK, and Vellayan Subbiah, former MD of Cholamandalam Investment also took part. The funds will be utilised for expanding the team and distribution of its API Banking platform Payouts. Cashfree had earlier raised from Y Combinator and other investors in 2017.
Cashfree's API Banking platform lets businesses send money round-the-clock and instantly to bank accounts, UPI and cards with a simple integration with their product, instead of uploading complicated files on their corporate banking portals.
Cashfree is used by more than 12000 businesses for vendor payouts, wage payouts, bulk refunds, expense reimbursements, loyalty & rewards. It counts Xiaomi, Tencent, Delhivery, Zomato, Cred, Club Factory, ExxonMobil, donation platforms like Ketto and Milaap amongst its customers.
Cashfree was launched in 2015 as a payment gateway. While operating the payment gateway, the founders, Akash and Reeju, found it difficult to use online bank portals for disbursing payments everyday. In mid-2016, Cashfree decided to build a dedicated bulk Payouts solution for businesses operating in India.
Akash Sinha, Co-Founder and CEO of Cashfree, said “We have been growing 25% every month, for the last 12 months. With the new round of funding we will expand our product team and build for new use cases faster.”
“We are in an exciting phase of fintech in India. There are new companies coming up that require flexibility and control over how money moves. Our API Banking platform, Payouts, enables this. It connects any organisation's software product or ERP to the banking system for automated transactions. Organisations that need to move fast cannot afford to have slow, error prone processes of uploading complex files on banking portals and manually reconciling failed transfers for 1000s of transactions every day. API Banking is the future of business banking in India and we are at its forefront,” he said.
