Good afternoon, it's Thursday and we're got quite a bit of Fintech news out today. It has also been a busy fundraising week in India with online events platform Hublio raising a monster Series A and Innovacer becoming India next unicorn. But today we have news of Razorpay's next round and a fintech veteran's new company.
http://bit.ly/3bGB2R2: Razorpay looks raise at a $2B valuation
➡️ Razorpay, the fintech company, is in talks with its existing investor GIC (Singapore's sovereign investment fund) and others to raise another $150-$200M in a new financing round that would value the company at over $2B. This news comes just months after the company's last round where it was valued at over $1B.
➡️ With Stripe trading at over $100B in the secondary markets and the continual digitzation of several industries it makes a bunch of sense why Razorpay is looking to raise more capital as it continues its growth journey.
➡️ While expanding its suite of products on the payments side (fraud analytics & security), I assume the company will also continue to allocate more resources to its business neobanking product (RazorpayX) and its lending vertical (Razorpay Credit) as it expects those to contribute 35% of their total revenue at some point.
➡️ The Indian ecosystem seems as excited about Razorpay as the US does about Stripe (which honestly feels kinda rare for India - I can't name very many large Indian startups where I hear endlessly positive anecdotes both publicly and privately)
http://bit.ly/3aRAXeb: Pravin Jadhav announces his new company- Raise
➡️ Pravin Jadhav (previously of Freecharge and Paytm Money fame) has finally announced what he's been working on- Raise Financial Services. The company aims to build financial services, namely across Financing, Insurance, Investments, Payments and Wealth for the "35 Mn+ tax paying citizens of India"
➡️ The company has also raised an undisclosed amount of capital in their first round of funding led by Mirae Asset Venture Investments (the first investment out of their new fund), with participating from the who's who of Indian fintech, Blume Ventures (through their Founders Fund), and US based Social Leverage.
➡️ While a lot of founders are focused on building for the Next Billion Users in India, Pravin is centering the company's services around financially aware users in Tier 1 & 2 cities (aka India 1). I guess this especially makes sense in the financial services space since those are the folks who actually have the money to invest in them.
➡️ The company seems to be on a hiring spree as well and aims to set up a team of 100+ with its base in Mumbai and will launching multiple products over the next 18-24 months. I think we will see the company's first product somewhere in the latter half of this year and I am definitely hyped for it.
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