Payment gateway firm Cashfree to expand API banking platform with new funding round

Payment gateway startup Cashfree is planning to expand its team and distribution of its application programming interface (API) banking platform with the capital it has raised in its Series A round of funding.

The company announced on Tuesday that South Korea-based venture capital firm Smilegate Investments had led the investment of $5.5 million (around Rs 38 crore).

Cashfree’s existing investors also participated. These included Silicon Valley-based accelerator Y Combinator, former British chancellor George Osborne, and Vellayan Subbiah, former managing director of Cholamandalam Investment.

Cashfree’s API banking platform, Payouts, lets businesses send money round-the-clock and instantly to bank accounts, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) handles and cards integrated with their product..

“Our API banking platform connects any organisation’s software product or ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning platform] to the banking system for automated transactions,” said Akash Sinha, co-founder and chief executive officer of Cashfree.

The company claimed that it had been growing 25% every month for the last 12 months. “With the new round of funding we will expand our product team and build for new use cases faster,” Sinha added.

Cashfree was founded in 2015 by Sinha and Reeju Datta. It started out as a payments and banking technology company. After a year of operations, the company decided to build a dedicated bulk payouts solution for businesses operating in India, Datta told TechCircle in an interview last November.

Cashfree’s payment gateway supports instant refunds, a split payment solution for marketplaces, a Bank Account Verification API and Auto Collect -- a virtual account solution to match inbound payments to customers.

According to the company, Cashfree is used by more than 12.000 businesses for vendor payouts, wage payouts, bulk refunds, expense reimbursements, loyalty and rewards. It counts Xiaomi, Tencent, Delhivery, Zomato, Cred, Club Factory, and ExxonMobil among its clients.

After being incubated by digital payments giant PayPal, Cashfree received $120,000 in seed funding round from Y Combinator in 2017.

Before starting Cashfree, Sinha worked with e-commerce giant Amazon as a software engineer while Datta was marketing executive at home furnishing firm FabFurnish.com.