BharatPe expands services to 100 Indian cities, targets 300 by 2023

Merchant-focused financial services provider BharatPe has announced that it has expanded its services to 100 cities in India. 

The New Delhi-based startup said in a statement that it has launched the first phase of the expansion, under which QR payment acceptance and loan services are being provided to merchant partners and small businesses in several tier 2, 3, 4 cities and towns.  

This includes cities such as Guwahati, Vellore, Hosur, Nagpur, Raipur, Bilaspur, Bhubaneswar, Kochi, and Coimbatore as well as tourist hubs such as Pondicherry, Amritsar, Varanasi, Agra, Allahabad, Mathura, and Nainital.  

The second phase will see the rollout of other fintech products for merchants and will begin over the coming months, the statement added. By 2023, BharatPe, which operates under Resilient Innovations, plans to expand to 300 cities, it said. 

“BharatPe has witnessed a notable spike in digital transactions beyond its top 30 cities over the last one year, with an increase in 70% in number of transactions and 120% in value of transactions (TPV),” Suhail Sameer, group president of BharatPe, said. 

“... We plan to add 4 million merchants to our existing list of over 6 million merchants by the end of 2021,” Sameer added. 

The expansion comes just a month after the company closed a $108 million growth funding round, led by returning investor Coatue Management. In that round, BharatPe said that 18 of its angel investors had exited, with returns as high as 80X.  

Founded by Ashneer Grover and Shashvat Nakrani in 2018, the startup has raised nearly $270 million in equity and debt funding to date. Currently, it processes over 8 crore UPI transactions per month with an annualised transaction processed value of more than $7 billion. It also claims to have facilitated the disbursement of over Rs 1,200 crore to merchant partners since launch.