India digital banking player Open raises $100m
Temasek Holdings has led a $100 million Series C round for Indian online banking company Open Financial Technologies with support from Google.
Tiger Global Management, SBI Investment, and 3one4 Capital also participated in the round, which values the company at $500 million. Tiger led a $30 million Series B in 2019, while 3one4 contributed to a $5 million Series A earlier that year. Total funding since inception in 2016 comes to $137 million.
Open offers all-digital banking services to 1.5 million small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) such as bookkeeping, payroll, direct payouts, and multiple accounts management. It claims to be the fastest-growing platform of its kind globally with around 90,000 SMEs joining the platform every month.
The company supports more than $20 billion in annualized transactions. The product suite also includes a plastic payments card offering in partnership with Visa, a virtual card service for online payments, and a payments gateway that facilitates transactions with mobile wallets and India’s national digital money transfer infrastructure.
The plan is to grow the customer base to 5 million SMEs by August next year, with a focus on expansions in Southeast Asia, Europe, and the US. There will also be a buildout of new product lines such as Zwitch, an embedded finance platform, and BankingStack, a cloud-native SME banking platform for financial institutions.
Previous investors in Open include Japan’s Beenext, Singapore’s Tanglin Venture Partners, AngelList India, Unicorn India Ventures, Austria’s SpeedInvest, and Apoletto, a vehicle associated with DST Global founder Yuri Milner. India’s Trifecta Capital provided about $3.4 million in venture debut earlier this year.
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