BharatPe raises $15.5 mn in funding from Insight Partners, Sequoia, Beenext

BharatPe, a fintech startup that provides merchants with interoperable UPI QR codes has raised $15.5 million in Series A funding. Insight Partners has joined the company’s existing investors, Sequoia and Beenext, in the round. The company said it plans to deploy the funding towards scaling its operations and pursuing its mission of empowering millions of merchants with UPI payments within the next two years.

“The funding will fuel our mission of democratizing digital payments for merchants, and make UPI a preferred way to pay,” said Ashneer Grover, CEO and co-founder of BharatPe.

Vinny Pujji, a senior investment associate at Insight Partners said that the partnership with BharatPe provides the organisation “a window into one of the fastest growing fintech markets globally”.

Co-founded in 2018 by Ashneer Grover and Shashvat Nakrani, the company is working towards driving the adoption of UPI among merchants and has established operations in 11 cities including Indore, Bhopal, Nagpur, Chandigarh, and Jaipur.

Grover said that over the last few months, the company has been able to transform payments for over 600,000 merchants in India. They now have a single QR code for all UPI payments, from any payment app. “BharatPe facilitates 10% of overall UPI merchant transactions in the country and accounts for 1% of overall UPI,” said Grover.

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has touched nearly 800 million transactions, amounting to Rs 1.3 lakh crore in March, according to the data by the National Payments Corporation of India. Besides NPCI’s BHIM app, a number of private players including banking apps are using UPI for payments. The number of banks that are now live on UPI are 142. The amount transacted through BHIM until February was Rs 5,624 crore.

Earlier this week, tech company Google said that its payment arm Google Pay’s monthly active users have grown three times, from 14 million in March 2018 to 45 million in March 2019. Total money value flowing through Google Pay equals $81 billion at an annualised run-rate level.