SoftBank Vision Fund 2 leads $60 mn funding for Payments tech firm Juspay

Juspay processes 300 mn online transactions a month with gross value of over $5 bn; has highest number of payment SDK (software development kits) installed on 250 mn mobile phones

Juspay Technologies, a frictionless digital payments platform has raised  $60 million in Series C funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 with participation from existing investors VEF and Wellington Management.

Juspay has been valued at about $460 million compared to its previous valuation of around $140 million.

Founded in 2012, Juspay is on a mission to build a robust payments operating system for India. It has played a pivotal role in improving the user experience for billions of payment transactions for leading merchants like Amazon, Flipkart and Swiggy. Today, the bulk of mobile payments in India go through Juspay’s platform. It processes 11 million transactions per day, one of the highest in India, with best-in-class reliability.

Juspay intends to invest the funds in technology and product development to scale its business in payments and product adjacencies like credit - both in India and globally. Avendus Capital has advised Juspay in this funding round.Founded in 2012, Juspay offers an intelligent technology platform that unifies payment gateways to give merchants a seamless, secure, reliable, end-to-end, enterprise-grade payment stack to achieve higher revenue at lower cost.

“Juspay has been in the forefront, building foundational infrastructure by unifying and enhancing hundreds of diverse payment options in a neutral way,” said Vimal Kumar, the founder and CEO of Juspay. “We believe in ecosystem innovations like UPI and OCEN (Open Credit Enablement Network) and have built a deep value-driven culture to support such initiatives. This funding will help us scale up our mission in India and expand globally.”

Juspay’s solutions have transformed the 3 important layers of payments: customer experience, payments integration, and the foundational bank infrastructure. Its notable inventions include Juspay Safe - world’s first payment browser that simplifies payment authentication, HyperSDK - the largest payments SDK distribution installed across 250 million mobile phones, and Express Checkout - India’s leading payments orchestration platform to boost transaction success rates.

“Juspay is one of the most innovative deep tech companies in India’s fast growing digital payments market,” said Vishal Gupta, director, SoftBank Investment Advisers. “It is solving the complex needs of an evolving fintech ecosystem. We believe in Juspay’s vision to simplify payments for billions of people globally and deliver higher revenue at lower cost for merchants.”

Juspay, one of the earliest proponents of UPI, has a suite of UPI products for merchants, banks and ecosystem players. Its flagship product 'UPI In a Box'' offers a UPI stack that powers Amazon, Cred and Swiggy. It also offers On-Cloud UPI PSP which powers the UPI stack for banks like Axis Bank and Yes Bank. Juspay is also a strong contributor to improving the financial ecosystem for India. It was the key development contributor of BHIM App, GeM SAHAY (offers credit facility for Government eMarketplace) and BECKN protocol (community initiative to create open digital commerce networks).

According to the sources, SoftBank was targeting to invest over $4 billion in India this year in the technology sector. These include edtech, healthtech, e-commerce, B2B marketplaces and software-as-a-service (SaaS). The investments will come from SoftBank's Vision Fund 2. It could invest $5-$10 billion in India next year in the technology sector. In India, SoftBank has backed many companies and unicorns or startups with over $1 billion in valuation. These include Paytm, Oyo, Ola, Lenskart, Policybazaar, FirstCry, Meesho, Unacademy, Zeta, Swiggy, Ola Electric and InMobi.

This July, food delivery firm Swiggy closed a $1.25-billion fundraise, marking the first investment in the category by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. This took the valuation of the Bengaluru-based startup up by more than 50 per cent to $5.5 billion from $3.6 billion earlier. In September this year, social e-commerce start-up Meesho raised $570 million, from investors including SoftBank. Following the fund-raise, Meesho’s valuation more than doubled to $4.9 billion in less than five months. In September this year, edtech startup Unacademy became a unicorn after it raised $150 million in a round led by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank valuing it at $1.45 billion, a three-fold jump in just six months.