FreeCharge claims 10M wallet users within 60 days of launch

Snapdeal-controlled FreeCharge has secured 10 million users for its digital wallet service that was launched on September 25.

The digital wallet service is aiming for a 35-million user base by March 2016.

As part of its expansion plans, FreeCharge will foray into new payment services in the next few months and has already tied up with a number of retailers, the company said in a statement. FreeCharge wallet will soon be available across the top 50 online merchants, it added.

Founded in 2010 by MBA dropout Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon, Freecharge is a portal/app used to make prepaid, postpaid, DTH and electricity bill payments in addition to payments to online and offline merchants.

In September this year, Freecharge announced its foray into the digital wallet space with Freecharge digital wallet, in a partnership with YES Bank.

Within five days of its launch, the company claimed it had notched up 1 million users for the wallet service.

"We did fastest 1 million in 10 days and now we are clocking a million in just under every five days," Govind Rajan, chief operating officer of FreeCharge and also the chief strategy officer of Snapdeal, had said.

In April, Freecharge, run by Accelyst Solutions Pvt Ltd, was acquired by Snapdeal for a deal estimated to be around $450 million (Rs 2,900 crore), in what is believed to be the biggest deal till date in the Indian consumer internet space.

In February, prior to its acquisition, Freecharge raised $80 million in Series C round of funding from a group of investors, including San Francisco-based hedge fund Valiant Capital Management and Hong Kong-based hedge fund Tybourne Capital Management.

Currently, Paytm is the market leader in the digital wallet space with more than 100 million users and hopes to bring around 500 million users by 2020. Paytm reached the 100 million mark in August this year.

Besides Paytm, FreeCharge will compete with MobiKwik, Oxigen and PayU in the growing digital wallet space.