Vision Fund 2 leads $60m Series C for India's Juspay
SoftBank Vision Fund 2 has led a $60 million Series C funding round for Juspay Technologies, an India-based financial technology start-up that specializes in digital payments.
Existing investors Vostok Emerging Finance (VEF) and Wellington Management also took part in the round. VEF led Juspay’s $21.6 million Series B in 2020, supported by Wellington and Accel Partners. Accel provided the company’s INR400 million ($5.8 million) Series A in 2016.
Founded in 2012, Juspay claims to unify payment gateways, giving merchants a seamless and secure enterprise-grade payment stack to achieve higher revenue at lower cost. It processes 11 million transactions per day – amounting to the bulk of India’s mobile payments – working with the likes of Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy, Tata, Airtel, Jio, BigBasket, Pharmeasy, Ola, Uber, and MPL.
On a monthly basis, the company handles 300 million online transactions with gross value of over $5 billion. It has payment software development kits (SDKs) installed across 250 million mobile phones.
The product line includes Juspay Safe, a payment browser that simplifies authentication; HyperSDK, a payments SDK that allows merchants to customize the payment experience; Express Checkout, a payments orchestration platform; UPI in a Box, a unified payments interface (UPI) stack for merchants; and On-Cloud UPI, a payment service provider for banks.
Juspay was one of the earliest proponents of UPI, which was introduced to reduce the frictional cost of payments. Previously, the $2 processing charges levied on merchants for a $100 payment were split between the payment provider, the scheme or wall, and the bank, with the bank getting the lion’s share. UPI reduced the charge to $0.10.
While Alibaba and Tencent stole a march in China, creating closed-loop ecosystems anchored by their own digital wallets, India’s introduction of UPI effectively prevented anyone from doing the same. This has prompted start-ups to use payments as a means of customer acquisition, but not a driver of monetization. They rely on value-added services for that.
“Juspay is one of the most innovative deep tech companies in India’s fast-growing digital payments market. It is solving the complex needs of an evolving fintech ecosystem,” said Vishal Gupta, a director at SoftBank Investment Advisors, in a statement.
“We believe in Juspay’s vision to simplify payments for billions of people globally and deliver higher revenue at lower cost for merchants.”
The new funding will be invested in technology and product development with a view to achieving rapid scale in payments. Juspay is also eyeing adjacent market segments such as credit.
Avendus Capital advised Juspay in this funding round.
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