Tiger backs India’s Open Financial at $1b valuation
Indian digital banking start-up Open Financial Technologies has received funding from Tiger Global Management, Temasek Holdings, 3one 4 Capital, and IIFL at a valuation of USD 1bn.
The Series D round, said to be approximately USD 50m, comes seven months after a USD 100m Series C led by Temasek and featuring Tiger, 3one4, Google, and SBI Investment. The latest investment is touted as establishing Open as India’s 100th unicorn, although there is no consensus on the exact count.
Open automates routine financial operations for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) such as bookkeeping, payroll, and maintaining multiple bank accounts, while providing clients with reliable records of each transaction. It offers virtual and plastic Visa cards for business expenses and brands itself as a neobank.
The company claims to serve more than 2.3m SMEs and process around USD 30bn of transactions a year. This compares to 1.5m SMEs and USD 20b in annual transactions at the time of the Series C. Then, the plan was to hit 5m SMEs by August 2022 with the addition of new product lines around embedded finance and cloud-native banking.
Open has raised more than USD 210m since its inception in 2016, according to AVCJ Research. Previous investors also include Better Capital, SpeedInvest, Tanglin Venture Partners, Trifecta Capital, Beenext Capital, Unicorn India Ventures, AngelList India, and Apoletto, a vehicle associated with DST Global founder Yuri Milner.
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