Ezetap Raises Series A funding from Social+Capital Partnership; Peter Thiel Among Other Involved Investors

Wednesday November 07, 2012 , 3 min Read

Ezetap Mobile Solutions–a company transforming the way merchants and consumers transact in emerging markets, today announced that Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social+Capital Partnership (“SocialCapital”)has led its Series ‘A’ financing. The company also announced that other investors in this round include industry luminaries Peter Thiel, Nicolas Berggruen and David Sacksas well as AngelPrime, Ezetap’s initial investor. Ezetap’s end-to-end service has been launched in India and and Kenya, and will soon be available in other countries across Asia and Africa.

“The transformation of mobile handsets into intelligent points-of-sale has revolutionized the payments industry, but for the most part this growth has been in the USA and parts of Western Europe,” said Abhijit Bose, Co-Founder and CEO of Ezetap. “The opportunity in emerging markets is an order of magnitude larger. In India alone, there are almost 300 million cards but only 600,000 terminals. However, the low penetration of smart-phones, distribution challenges, and early stage inmarket maturity requires a different understanding of the customer, business model, and breadth of capabilities.”

The Ezetap offering is an end-to-end service that includes a mobile card-reader, a configurable mobile application (that works with both feature phones and smart devices), and a flexible platform that allows Ezetap or any third party to build and turn on value-added services that are tightly integrated to its core payment service. All of the technology has been developed and built by Ezetap. The service is built to the worldwide PCI-DSS standard, works in all markets of the world out of the box and has been certified by some of the world’s leading financial insitutions.

“Mobile devices as a point-of-salewillnot just transform payments in emerging markets, but also have a tremendous social impact in the process”, said Chamath Palihapitiya, Managing Partner of SocialCapital. “It was clear to us that the winner was going to be a company that truly understood the nuances of these markets and was able to build a differentiated platform that could scale quickly across regions. The Ezetap team is unique in that they combine Silicon Valley DNA with decades of on-the-ground entrepreneurial and mobile payments experience in India.”

Based in Bangalore, India, the company was co-founded in 2011 by Abhijit Bose who was a former executive at ngpay, a leading mCommerce company, Bhaktha Keshavachar who brings many years of expertise in hardware and chip design at Intel and Sharp, and mobile payments pioneer Sanjay Swamy who was the ex-CEO of mChek and most recently a volunteer for India’s UID project focused on Authentication & Authorization.

Ezetap has been incubated by AngelPrime Partners, a hands-on startup incubator that was formed by Swamy and former Snapfish founders, Bala Parthasarathy, and Shripati Acharya.“We’re excited to welcome Chamath to the Board of Directors of Ezetap – his experience in building and scaling consumer-facing products in hyper-growth start-ups will go a long way in helping Ezetap become a leader in emerging markets”, said Swamy, Managing Partner of AngelPrime and Chairman of Ezetap.

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