[Funding alert] PayU India co-founder Shailaz Nag’s startup Dot raises $8M in seed round

PayU India co-founder Shailaz Nag's new startup, Dot, on Thursday announced it has raised an initial seed funding of around $8 million, led by PayU Finance Indiaand Fosun RZ Capital.

The round also saw participation from Info Edge Ventures and other well-known angel investors, which include Snapdeal founders Rohit Bansal and Kunal Bahl as well as Citrus Pay co-founder Amrish Rau.

Incorporated last year, Dotis an offline-to-online commerce and fintech platform, which provides digital transformation and commerce solutions to brick and mortar outlets, while providing extensive customer engagement offerings to these stores.

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Speaking on the market potential, Shailaz Nag, Founder, Dot, said,

“There is a huge potential in the offline-to-online commerce and fintech sector, offering immense opportunities for the right product. India has the second largest number of internet users in the world and a rapidly increasing smartphone user base. This coupled with the recent digitisation push both from the government and the private sector is generating tremendous demand for digital transformation solutions by brick and mortar stores. I personally see a significant potential in this space, which has led to the conception of Dot.”

Dot is Shailaz Nag’s second stint as an entrepreneur after he quit PayU in July last year. He was the Co-founder and Managing Director of PayU, and led its payments business in India, having spent over eight years in the company, for which India is a core market.

Commenting on the fundraise, Anirban Mukherjee, CEO, PayU India, said,

“Dot is a great fit to PayU’s larger vision of developing a fintech ecosystem in India and its aim to deliver a complete value proposition to our growing customers. We are creating alliances through investments in companies whose vision is aligned to ours. With this investment in Dot, we aim to play a pivotal role in helping offline merchants with their digitization journey.”

Headquartered in Gurugram, Dot is led by an experienced team of three ex-PayU employees - Shailaz Nag, Gyanesh Sharma, and Anurag Gupta, all having expertise in the fintech ecommerce space as well as in building and managing companies.

Tej Kapoor, co-executive president of Fosun RZ Capital, said, 

“The Dot team has a deep and intrinsic understanding of the Indian fintech space and a proven history of creating and running successful companies, be it PayU or Ibibo. The current digital experience of offline merchants is broken at many levels and the engagement with customers is non-existent. Dot will change that and consequently create immense value.”

Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder and Executive Vice Chairman, Info Edge, added, 

“We believe that Dot has identified an important untapped market segment. It is founded by a stellar team and has the first-mover advantage, which is a winning combination.”

Last year, Jitendra Gupta, PayU India’s other Managing Director and Co-founder of Citrus Pay (acquired by PayU India in 2016), also put down his papers to start a digital banking platform called Amica Financial Technologies.

In November, the firm announced it raised a seed round of $24 million from venture capital firms Sequoia Capital, Matrix Partners, 3One4 Capital, Tanglin Venture Partners, BeeNext, Germany’s Rocket Internet, and London-based Greyhound Capital. Post the funding, the startup was valued at $70 million.  

Further, the rush to equip digital tools to SMEs is picking up. Earlier this week, Noida-based payments major Paytm announced the launch of its ‘All-in-One’ PG to allow SMEs to create and share payments links and invoices without investing time and resources to build their own platform.

Apart from this, Instamojo, a technology platform for MSMEs, earlier this week announced the acquisition of Times Internet's GetMeAShop to empower Indian SMEs with SaaS offerings. 

(Edited by Megha Reddy)

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