Beenext bets on fintech startup YAP in a $4.5 mn Series A round

Chennai headquartered M2p Solutions, which owns fintech platform YAP, has raised $4.5 million in a Series A round led by Singapore-based venture capital firm Beenext.

Venture capital firms 8i Ventures and Better Capital, The DMI Group via its alternative investment fund (AIF) vehicle The Sparkle Fund, and angel investors including Indifi Technologies founder Alok Mittal, BharatPe founder Ashneer Grover, Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau and Jupiter founder Jitendra Gupta also participated in the round, according to a statement.

YAP will use the fresh capital to hire talent, and improve its technology stack to expand its offerings to credit products, corporate banking, cross border payments and neo banking, it said. 

The capital infusion comes two months after YAP raised $1.3 million from angel investors Rau, Gupta and Cred founder Kunal Shah. 

Founded in 2014 by Muthukumar A, Madhusudan R and Prabhu R, the platform provides application programme interface (API) solutions to banks and financial technology companies to develop products around bank accounts and term deposits, in addition to a range of digital payment modes including toll payments. 

The company claims to have 250 businesses on its platform, of which 200 are startups and also include banks such as YES Bank, DCB Bank and Equitas SFB. As of December 2019, the company claims to have processed over $2 billion in annual payments and witnessed more than 50 million transactions.

“We are at an early stage of cloud banking in India. Our vision is to help any company start a fintech business, with easy-to-integrate APIs and our strong partnership with leading financial services players. With this capital, we are well poised to realise this vision,” co-founder Muthukumar said.

Dirk Van Quaquebeke, managing partner of lead investor Beenext, said he had been on the lookout for a “fintech anywhere” platform company in India for a year before finalising the investment in YAP. 

Last week, fintech platform Setu, which operates in the same space as YAP, raised $15 million (around Rs 110 crore) in a Series A round led by returning investor Lightspeed Venture Partners. 

Other companies in the fintech space that were funded recently include Capital Float, which raised $15 million in an equity capital round from returning investors Ribbit Capital, Amazon, SAIF Partners and Sequoia Capital India, and Gurugram-based non-banking financial company Aye Finance, which raised $23.8 million in debt from lenders in India and abroad.