Cashfree raises USD 35 million led by Apis Growth Fund II

By Edil Corneille

Bengaluru-based FinTech Cashfree has received USD 35.3 million (approximately INR 2.6 billion) as part of its Series B raise. The investment was led by growth stage financial services investor, Apis Growth Fund II, with participation from existing investor Y Combinator.

Cashfree processes online payments for thousands of Indian businesses. The company is a 2017 alumnus of Y Combinator, the start-up incubator based in San Francisco, and has processed over USD 12 billion annualised payment volumes as of March 2020. Cashfree has been profitable since its first year of operations and counts more than 50,000 businesses amongst its merchants including companies such as Cred, BigBasket, Zomato, HDFC Ergo, Ixigo, Acko, Zoomcar, and Delhivery among others.

Cashfree mentioned that one of the key growth drivers is its bulk disbursal solution – Payouts – that was launched in 2016 and grew quickly to 100,000 daily transactions within a year. Payouts helps businesses send money instantly to bank accounts, cards, UPI, and wallets with a simple integration. In addition to Payouts, Cashfree’s Payment Gateway supports payments from more than 100 payment channels (including debit/credit cards, RuPay, UPI, bank transfers, wallets and various instalment options).

The Fund’s investment comes as Cashfree’s rapid growth is said to have accelerated with rising e-commerce penetration. The investment will support the company’s growth plans including launching and further rolling out new products. More recently Cashfree has introduced solutions such as an instant settlement offering on its payment gateway and a UPI Stack with 15 ready-to-use integrations for all business payment needs including collections, disbursals, and verifications using UPI infrastructure.

The investment will also assist the company in making selective bolt-on acquisitions to further augment its geographic and product reach.

Akash Sinha, CEO and Co-founder of Cashfree enthused, “We are delighted to have Apis as an investor and partner in our journey and value their extensive experience investing in high growth digital payments companies, like Cashfree, across several geographies globally. This investment is an endorsement of Cashfree’s platform as well as our vision to empower customers and businesses with the latest payments tools. Over the years, we have built a strong presence among enterprises by innovating for experience, scale and security. We still see payments as an evolving industry with its own challenges and we would be investing in next-gen payments as well as banking tech to make payments processing easier and more reliable…”

Joining Cashfree as a board member, Udayan Goyal, Managing Partner and Apis Co-Founder said, “As digital payments proliferate globally, the Indian market continues to represent one of the most exciting opportunities that we see in the world. Cashfree has maintained a leadership position in this space and is now going through a period of rapid growth fuelled by the development of unique and innovative products that serve the needs of its customers…”

Matteo Stefanel, Managing Partner and Apis Co-Founder said, “As an experienced investor in payments globally, we are thrilled to become a key investor in Cashfree and to partner with Akash Sinha and Reeju Datta who together have built a tremendous business in a highly competitive market such as India…”