[Funding alert] Fintech startup Volopay raises $2.1M in seed round led by Tinder founder Justin Mateen

Singapore-based fintech startup Volopay has raised $2.1 million in seed funding. The company said it wants to use the funding to provide businesses and startups in the Asia Pacific region a powerful control centre for all their financial needs.

The latest funding round was led by Tinder founder Justin Mateen. The round also saw participation from Soma Capital, CP Ventures, Y Combinator, VentureSouq, the founders of Razorpay - Shashank Kumar and Harshil Mathur, and other prominent angel investors.

The company said new funds will be used for hiring, product development, international expansion, and strategic partnerships. 

Founded in 2019 by Rajith Shaji and Rajesh Raikwar, Volopay was started out of a personal experience. The co-founders were working at a leading financial services comparison platform based in Singapore, and realised it was challenging to track different company spending like subscriptions, vendor payments, and employee reimbursements.

Rajith said, “I realised employee expenses and shared bank cards was a huge problem for businesses of all sizes, especially startups. The lack of visibility meant they were losing money due to unaccounted expenses. Volopay sets out to re-imagine business banking for startups and tech companies while providing significant cash-back and saving.” 

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The team said more than 100 companies have started using the product in Singapore and these include Smart Karma, Dathena, Medline, Sensorflow, and Beam. The company stated the COVID-19 environment has accelerated the need for SMEs to digitise their operations so they are better able to scale and serve their customers in interactions which are now often done remotely or digitally. 

Jimmy Lee, Director of Finance at mobility startup Beam, said: “Volopay is the expense management tool to look out for. They've innovated quickly in the past few months to build products that helped us to reduce time, effort, and cost in expense management and giving us generous cashback on card spending". 

The startup has also integrated with fintech giant Airwallex’s API suite. “We are excited to be Volopay’s chosen API partner at such a significant stage of the company’s growth. Airwallex’s purpose is to empower businesses like Volopay to grow without borders and as a result, contribute to the growth of the global economy,” said Dave Stein, Head Of Corporate Development at Airwallex.

The platform offers companies business accounts, corporate cards, money transfers, expense tracking, subscription management, and accounting all in one single platform. It also has a corporate card for startups. 

In a statement, Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alstromer said: “Helping companies with tools that make it easier to do business and get their expenses under control is a huge opportunity globally, especially in the post-COVID world. Volopay has already shown they are ready to create the financial control centre for businesses of all sizes that need to grow and scale. We have seen this already with Brex in the USA, and see that Volopay is on a similar trajectory to empower businesses across the Asia Pacific.”

Volopay currently operates in Singapore and said it plans to expand across the Asia-Pacific region over the next three years. The startup will be launching operations in Australia in late January 2021.