Accel leads $5.8m round for India's Juspay

Juspay will use the proceeds from the new round, which also included several angel investors, to expand its team and to build its technology platform, according to a post on YourStory linked from Juspay's Twitter account. Accel will take a 20% stake in the company, and Subrata Mitra, who led the deal for Accel, will join Juspay's board.

Juspay aims to provide a simple and secure platform for the processing of online and mobile payments. Its first product, Juspay Safe, is a specialized web browser for online banking and payment applications. The company claims the browser provides greater security and ease of use for these firms than general-purpose browsers.

In addition to banking, Juspay also caters to e-commerce platforms such as Amazon India, Snapdeal, MakeMyTrip, and FoodPanda with services that aggregate multiple payment options to streamline checkout. Currently its platform processes about 700,000 transactions per day, up from less than 100,000 a year ago.

India's e-commerce boom has fueled a number of payment-oriented start-ups with various strategies. One popular model is the online wallet, which caters to the many customers who do not have credit or debit cards. This increasingly crowded category includes FreeCharge, backed by Sequoia Capital and bought by Snapdeal last year; MobiKwik, supported by Sequoia and Tree Line Asia; and Paytm, which has received significant investment from China's Alibaba Group.

Other business models seek to encourage the adoption of credit and debit cards by making them easier for rural customers to use. VC-backed Mosambee and Ezetap manufacture card readers that can be connected to mobile phones, allowing cards to be used wherever there is a mobile signal.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Financials
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• Early-stage
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• India
• Accel Partners
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