[Funding alert] Fintech startup IppoPay raises undisclosed pre-seed round from Better Capital, angels

Chennai-based IppoPay said it has raised an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from investors including Better Capital, an early-stage investor, and Prabhu Rangarajan, who founded API platform for banking and payments M2P.

Rocketship VC's Sailesh Ramakrishnan, who is a partner at the venture capital firm, also invested in IppoPay's round, the startup said in a press release.

Founded in 2020 by Mohan K and Jai Kumar, IppoPay is a payment aggregator that lets businesses collect and accept payments from customers. It mostly operates in semi-urban India, and powers digital payments for small businesses, SMEs, freelancers, and homepreneurs, in Tier II, III, and rural areas.

The startup will use the funding to scale and reach one lakh merchants, as well as expand its offerings.

"Bharat merchants account for 30 percent of India’s GDP involving 460 million people, so catering to the needs of these merchants and bringing them the power of digital banking is significant as it has a direct impact on the Indian economy," Mohan said.

"Our goal is to put an end to every tedious and time taking task of a Bharat merchant handling his/her finances, and make them run faster and better with modern financial technology that is easy to use and delivered in their language," he said in the press statement.

The startup said it has grown 10X across multiple metrics in the last nine months. It processed over 1 crore transactions, from 5,000 merchants, in that period, and built partnerships with banks such as Axis, ICICI, Paytm, and Yes Bank.

"Ippo's offering is a perfect fit for Bharat merchants and is designed to scale to support a wide range of use cases that merchants face in Tier II to Tier IV India. We are excited to partner with Mohan and Jaikumar as they build Ippo from the ground up and bring financial digitisation to millions of underserved merchants," Vaibhav Domkundwar of Better Capital said.

IppoPay's USP is that it does not need any payment terminal, POS, or swiping machine. Merchants can generate QR codes using its mobile app. The founders have invested Rs 50 lakh of their own money into the startup, and its clients include milk vendors, newspaper boys, chit fund companies, and others.