Startups

Salesforce backs Indian payments startup Razorpay

Comment

Image Credits: Razorpay

Six-year-old Bangalore-based fintech Razorpay, which was valued at $3 billion in a financing round in April this year, has courted one more high-profile investor: Salesforce Ventures.

Razorpay said on Monday it has received a “strategic investment” from the venture arm of the American enterprise giant. The investment will help the startup “further strengthen its presence in the business banking space,” it said.

The two firms didn’t disclose the size of the investment, but the Sequoia Capital India-backed startup said the deal will “make an impactful contribution to the industry and drive adoption and financial growth for underserved small businesses in the next twelve months.”

Razorpay accepts, processes and disburses money online for small businesses and enterprises — essentially everything Stripe does in the U.S. and several other developed markets. But the Indian startup’s offering goes much further than that: in recent years, Razorpay has launched a neobanking platform to issue corporate credit cards, and it also offers businesses working capital.

With the global giant Stripe still nowhere in the Indian picture, Razorpay has grown to become the clear market leader and has started to expand to the Southeast Asian market.

“At Razorpay, we want to make further strides on the idea of investing in India’s digital future and building an intelligent payment and banking infrastructure for the new-world. We are delighted to associate with Salesforce Ventures and Salesforce more broadly in India,” said Harshil Mathur, co-founder and chief executive of the fintech startup.

“I am certain that this investment, along with support from our existing investors, will help build an ecosystem for a hassle-free, easy-to-integrate payments and banking experience. We also hope to expand, build new products and deliver this experience to businesses in South East Asian countries too.”

Monday’s deal is Salesforce Ventures’ second investment in the Indian startup ecosystem. The firm led a $15 million Series C financing round in Hyderabad-headquartered Darwinbox earlier this year.

“The journey towards a ‘less-cash’ economy has been accelerated with the pandemic. The rapid growth in digital payments over the last year has opened doors for technology innovation and Razorpay has been emerging as the company of choice for a lot of e-commerce businesses,” said Arundhati Bhattacharya, chairperson and chief executive of Salesforce India, in a statement.

“We are excited to support Razorpay in their journey to revolutionize digital finance not only in India, but globally as well,” added Bhattacharya, who joined the firm last year.

The Indian startup, which became a unicorn a year ago, said it has witnessed a 40-45% month-on-month growth in recent months. The startup is currently in the market to raise a new financing round and is negotiating a considerably larger valuation bump over the current value, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Scores of corporate giants, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, have started to chase strategic investments in the world’s second-largest internet market. Microsoft inked a strategic deal with Indian budget hotel chain Oyo, they confirmed this month.

India has produced a record 27 unicorns this year so far, up from 11 last year, as many high-profile global investors, including Tiger Global, Falcon Edge Capital, Temasek, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Coatue Management, increase the pace of their investments in the South Asian market. And the list continues to grow: a16z is in advanced stages to back Indian crypto startup CoinSwitch Kuber, TechCrunch reported last week.

More TechCrunch

“Running with scissors is a cardio exercise that can increase your heart rate and require concentration and focus,” says Google’s new AI search feature. “Some say it can also improve…

Using memes, social media users have become red teams for half-baked AI features

The European Space Agency selected two companies on Wednesday to advance designs of a cargo spacecraft that could establish the continent’s first sovereign access to space.  The two awardees, major…

ESA prepares for the post-ISS era, selects The Exploration Company, Thales Alenia to develop cargo spacecraft

Expressable is a platform that offers one-on-one virtual sessions with speech language pathologists.

Expressable brings speech therapy into the home

The French Secretary of State for the Digital Economy as of this year, Marina Ferrari, revealed this year’s laureates during VivaTech week in Paris. According to its promoters, this fifth…

The biggest French startups in 2024 according to the French government

Spotify is notifying customers who purchased its Car Thing product that the devices will stop working after December 9, 2024. The company discontinued the device back in July 2022, but…

Spotify to shut off Car Thing for good, leading users to demand refunds

Elon Musk’s X is preparing to make “likes” private on the social network, in a change that could potentially confuse users over the difference between something they’ve favorited and something…

X should bring back stars, not hide ‘likes’

The FCC has proposed a $6 million fine for the scammer who used voice-cloning tech to impersonate President Biden in a series of illegal robocalls during a New Hampshire primary…

$6M fine for robocaller who used AI to clone Biden’s voice

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Is it…

Tesla lobbies for Elon and Kia taps into the GenAI hype

Crowdaa is an app that allows non-developers to easily create and release apps on the mobile store. 

App developer Crowdaa raises €1.2M and plans a US expansion

Back in 2019, Canva, the wildly successful design tool, introduced what the company was calling an enterprise product, but in reality it was more geared toward teams than fulfilling true…

Canva launches a proper enterprise product — and they mean it this time

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 isn’t just an event for innovation; it’s a platform where your voice matters. With the Disrupt 2024 Audience Choice Program, you have the power to shape the…

2 days left to vote for Disrupt Audience Choice

The United States Department of Justice and 30 state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Ticketmaster, for alleged monopolistic practices. Live Nation and…

Ticketmaster antitrust lawsuit could give new hope to ticketing startups

The U.K. will shortly get its own rulebook for Big Tech, after peers in the House of Lords agreed Thursday afternoon to pass the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer bill…

‘Pro-competition’ rules for Big Tech make it through UK’s pre-election wash-up

Spotify’s addition of its AI DJ feature, which introduces personalized song selections to users, was the company’s first step into an AI future. Now, Spotify is developing an alternative version…

Spotify experiments with an AI DJ that speaks Spanish

Call Arc can help answer immediate and small questions, according to the company. 

Arc Search’s new Call Arc feature lets you ask questions by ‘making a phone call’

After multiple delays, Apple and the Paris area transportation authority rolled out support for Paris transit passes in Apple Wallet. It means that people can now use their iPhone or…

Paris transit passes now available in iPhone’s Wallet app

Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup founded by former Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, will be recycling production scrap for batteries going into General Motors electric vehicles.  The company announced Thursday…

Redwood Materials is partnering with Ultium Cells to recycle GM’s EV battery scrap

A new startup called Auggie is aiming to give parents a single platform where they can shop for products and connect with each other. The company’s new app, which launched…

Auggie’s new app helps parents find community and shop

Andrej Safundzic, Alan Flores Lopez and Leo Mehr met in a class at Stanford focusing on ethics, public policy and technological change. Safundzic — speaking to TechCrunch — says that…

Lumos helps companies manage their employees’ identities — and access

Remark trains AI models on human product experts to create personas that can answer questions with the same style of their human counterparts.

Remark puts thousands of human product experts into AI form

ZeroPoint claims to have solved compression problems with hyper-fast, low-level memory compression that requires no real changes to the rest of the computing system.

ZeroPoint’s nanosecond-scale memory compression could tame power-hungry AI infrastructure

In 2021, Roi Ravhon, Asaf Liveanu and Yizhar Gilboa came together to found Finout, an enterprise-focused toolset to help manage and optimize cloud costs. (We covered the company’s launch out…

Finout lands cash to grow its cloud spend management platform

On the heels of raising $102 million earlier this year, Bugcrowd is making good on its promise to use some of that funding to make acquisitions to strengthen its security…

Bugcrowd, the crowdsourced white-hat hacker platform, acquires Informer to ramp up its security chops

Google is preparing to build what will be the first subsea fiber-optic cable connecting the continents of Africa and Australia. The news comes as the major cloud hyperscalers battle it…

Google to build first subsea fiber-optic cable connecting Africa with Australia

The Kia EV3 — the new all-electric compact SUV revealed Thursday — illustrates a growing appetite among global automakers to bring generative AI into their vehicles.  The automaker said the…

The new Kia EV3 will have an AI assistant with ChatGPT DNA

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, was working improperly for several hours on Thursday in Europe. At first, we noticed it wasn’t possible to perform a web search at all. Now it…

Bing’s API was down, taking Microsoft Copilot, DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT’s web search feature down too

If you thought autonomous driving was just for cars, think again. The “autonomous navigation” market — where ships steer themselves guided by AI, resulting in fuel and time savings —…

Autonomous shipping startup Orca AI tops up with $23M led by OCV Partners and MizMaa Ventures

The best known mycoprotein is probably Quorn, a meat substitute that’s fast approaching its 40th birthday. But Finnish biotech startup Enifer is cooking up something even older: Its proprietary single-cell…

Meet the Finnish biotech startup bringing a long-lost mycoprotein to your plate

Silo, a Bay Area food supply chain startup, has hit a rough patch. TechCrunch has learned that the company on Tuesday laid off roughly 30% of its staff, or north…

Food supply chain software maker Silo lays off ~30% of staff amid M&A discussions