)
NumberMall Private Limited, a Hyderabad-based merchant-managed payment gateway services platform, is in the process of raising $10 million (approximately Rs 63.5 crore) in a Series-A round by the end of this fiscal year, its founder and chief executive officer Kiran Gali said.
"We are in talks with a couple of venture capitalists and expect to close the deal within this fiscal. We intend to utilise around 80% of the proceeds from the fresh fundraising to have a pan-India footprint," he told Business Standard.
Bootstrapped in 2012, NumberMall had in late 2014 raised Rs 5 crore from SRI Capital, a seed-stage venture capital fund promoted by serial entrepreneur Sashi Reddi.
The three-year-old startup enables kirana stores (neighbourhood mom-and-pop retail outlets) and other small business establishments to earn additional revenue by offering value-added services such as telecom recharges, DTH bill payments, bus ticket booking, domestic money transfers, bank cash deposits and hyper-local deals on its m-commerce platform.
According to Gali, NumberMall currently has 15,000 retail partners across 10 states, including Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The company plans to expand its reach to over 100,000 small merchants pan-India in the next one year.
"There are over 14 million small merchants in India, of which an estimated two million own a smartphone. The idea is to enable this growing base of tech-savvy small merchants to bridge the divide in digital commerce," he said.
NumberMall had registered a gross merchandise value (GMV) of Rs 37 crore in its first year of operations. It garnered a GMV of Rs 120 crore in the last financial year, and is aiming at breaching the Rs 300-crore mark this year, and touch Rs 1,000 crore in the next fiscal, he added.
