Fintech firm Fingpay raises $3.5 mn from IvyCap Ventures

Mumbai headquartered Tapits Technologies, which operates fintech platform Fingpay, has raised $3.5 million in a Series A funding round from venture capital firm IvyCap Ventures. 

The company will use the capital to develop new products and services, with the aim to become a digital bank, a statement said. 

Founded in 2016 by Pratyush Halen and Anuraag Agrawal, Fingpay provides payment solutions to merchants and their customers via Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Aadhaar Pay, point of sales (PoS) and Bharat QR, along with account statement solutions and digital verifications in last-mile areas. 

Fingpay claims to have on-boarded 10 crore people who can now access basic banking and online payments services. Last year, the platform saw 200 million transactions worth over Rs 10,000 crore, the company said.

In 2018, Fingpay raised $130,000 in a seed funding round from private lender ICICI Bank, which now holds nearly 10% stake in the company. 

“As we stride towards digital and financial inclusion, we are developing simple, secure and reliable banking and financial products for the last mile,” co-founder and CEO Halen said.

“While the volume of transactions that FingPay is executing is huge, this is just a small percentage of the size of the opportunity in India. We are also excited about opportunities that this will offer beyond just pure banking,” Vikram Gupta, managing partner and founder of IvyCap Ventures, said.

Founded in 2011, IvyCap Ventures invests in startups from segments including fintech, agritech, healthtech, enterprise-tech and emerging technology. It funds early-to-growth stage requirements in these companies. It has assets worth $120 million under management and is backed by 20 institutional investors. 

So far, the venture capital firm has closed two funds and launched a debt and angel fund. Its investments include beauty product startup Purplle, fintech firm ftcash, consumer technology startup BiryaniByKilo and software-as-a-service platform OnlineSales.ai.

Fintech startup funding, mirroring the overall investment sentiment, is quite subdued on account of the Covid-19 pandemic. On Thursday, Recko, an artificial intelligence-driven fintech startup that focuses on enterprises, raised $6 million in a Series A round led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India along with returning investor Prime Venture Partners. 

In the same week, Atlanta, Georgia-based small business lender Kabbage reportedly shut its Bengaluru office and furloughed a number of its US workforce.

Last month, MobiKwik raised $29.5 million in a combination of debt and equity issue from a Cayman Islands-based special purpose vehicle MK SPV IX LP.