Exclusive: Financial-technology startup ePaylater raises $2 mn

Financial-technology startup Epaylater.in, which is operated by Mumbai-based Arthashastra Fintech Pvt. Ltd, has secured $2 million (Rs 13.3 crore) in a seed round of funding from three high-net-worth individuals, a top company executive told Techcircle.in.

"The investors are leading personalities of the global financial industry and have invested in other fin-tech startups," said Akshat Saxena, co-founder of ePaylater.

The firm has also got further commitment from these investors.

It will use the funds for product development and marketing.

ePaylater was founded in December 2015 by Aurko Bhattacharya, Prasannaa Muralidharan, Uday Somayajula, Shanmuhanathan Thiagaraja and Saxena. The company gives customers the option to 'buy now and pay later' on online portals with just one click. The customers get 14 days to make the payment and within that period they can make many more transactions via single-click checkouts and can bunch them all together to make a single payment at the end of the period.

"In this way, the customer gets the look and feel of the product before making the payment," said co-founder Uday Somayajula.

The startup uses an algorithm to understand the customer's credit history and buying patterns on e-commerce platforms, digital footprint and device information based on which a credit limit is assigned to a customer.

The service is available for high-frequency, low-ticket products.

The company charges a commission per transaction from the merchant. The firm claims to be working with some of the leading e-commerce players.

"The Indian e-commerce space is expected to cross $75 billion by 2020 which would still be less than 10% of the size of the overall retail pie. We are looking at penetrating the e-commerce space enough before diversifying our portfolio to include offline payments," said Aurko Bhattacharya, another co-founder.

ePaylater joins a number of financial-technology startups in raising funds. Earlier this month, CreditVidya had secured $2 million (Rs 13.3 crore) in Series A funding from Kalaari Capital.

Last month, online investment platform Goalwise had raised $1 million from affluent individuals while online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform i2ifunding had secured Rs 2 crore from a group of angel investors.

In April, digital payments firm TranServ Pvt. Ltd had raised $15 million in its Series C round of investment led by venture capital fund IDFC SPICE and consumer electronics maker Micromax Informatics Ltd. The same month, online lending marketplace Deal4Loans had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from a bunch of investors.

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