Financial-technology startup ePayLater, which is operated by Mumbai-based Arthashastra Fintech Pvt. Ltd, has secured $2 million (Rs 13.3 crore) in a seed round of funding from HNIs who are amongst the leaders in the global financial industry. The firm has also got further commitment from these investors. It will use the funds for product development and marketing.
"We are a product centric company, which is also our Intellectual property. Bulk of the investment would be into product development. The other share would belong to Marketing and Business development," said Akshat Saxena, Co-founder, ePayLater.
The startup was founded in December 2015 by Aurko Bhattacharya, Prasannaa Murlidharan, Uday Somayajula, Shanmunathan Thiagaraja and Akshat Saxena. The company gives customers the option to “buy now and pay later” on online portals with just a 1-click. The customers are billed only after they receive the delivery of the product and hence its solution address the trust issues related to online shopping and acts as a good substitute for COD. In addition, the customers get 14 days to make the payment, in which time they can many more transaction trough a single click checkout, bunch them all together and make a single payment at the end of the period. Further, since the checkout is single click it offers a near 100% transaction success rate model unlike payment gateways which witness significant drops.
"We're building a very exciting product which takes real time credit and fraud decisions with none to minimal customer intervention/ inconvenience. We believe that we can offer the best payment customer experience - and that would be by being completely invisible and operating behind the scenes at the point of checkout!!," added Prasannaa Muralidharan, Co-founder, ePayLater.
"It's an avenue to put our knowledge and creativity into practice and solve some seemingly complex challenges. Besides the effort on product and marketing, we have also consciously tried to build a culture that fosters innovation. We often engage in blue sky discussions, and many of our ideas have actually taken shape when we least expected!," mentioned Aurko Bhattacharya, Co-founder, ePayLater.
The startup has on-boarded few leading eCommerce merchants already and hope to expand the list at a quick pace as the concept establishes its merits. The company charges a commission per transaction from the merchant.
"Indian e-commerce is expected to cross $75 Billion by 2020 which would still be less than 10% of the size of overall retail pie. We expect ePayLater to be the preferred payment solution considering that it offers the most exhaustive set of features to customers and merchants alike. We are looking at penetrating the e-commerce space enough before diversifying our portfolio to also include offline payments as well. This gives us a huge headroom and legroom for growth," said Akshat while commenting on the market size.
Recent deals in the space
Earlier this month, CreditVidya had secured $2 million in Series A funding from Kalaari Capital.
Last month, online investment platform Goalwise had raised $1 million from affluent individuals while online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform i2ifunding had secured Rs 2 crore from a group of angel investors.
In April, digital payments firm TranServ Pvt. Ltd had raised $15 million in its Series C round of investment led by venture capital fund IDFC SPICE and consumer electronics maker Micromax Informatics Ltd. The same month, online lending marketplace Deal4Loans had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from a bunch of investors.
Image Source: ShutterStock
"We are a product centric company, which is also our Intellectual property. Bulk of the investment would be into product development. The other share would belong to Marketing and Business development," said Akshat Saxena, Co-founder, ePayLater.
The startup was founded in December 2015 by Aurko Bhattacharya, Prasannaa Murlidharan, Uday Somayajula, Shanmunathan Thiagaraja and Akshat Saxena. The company gives customers the option to “buy now and pay later” on online portals with just a 1-click. The customers are billed only after they receive the delivery of the product and hence its solution address the trust issues related to online shopping and acts as a good substitute for COD. In addition, the customers get 14 days to make the payment, in which time they can many more transaction trough a single click checkout, bunch them all together and make a single payment at the end of the period. Further, since the checkout is single click it offers a near 100% transaction success rate model unlike payment gateways which witness significant drops.
"We're building a very exciting product which takes real time credit and fraud decisions with none to minimal customer intervention/ inconvenience. We believe that we can offer the best payment customer experience - and that would be by being completely invisible and operating behind the scenes at the point of checkout!!," added Prasannaa Muralidharan, Co-founder, ePayLater.
"It's an avenue to put our knowledge and creativity into practice and solve some seemingly complex challenges. Besides the effort on product and marketing, we have also consciously tried to build a culture that fosters innovation. We often engage in blue sky discussions, and many of our ideas have actually taken shape when we least expected!," mentioned Aurko Bhattacharya, Co-founder, ePayLater.
The startup has on-boarded few leading eCommerce merchants already and hope to expand the list at a quick pace as the concept establishes its merits. The company charges a commission per transaction from the merchant.
"Indian e-commerce is expected to cross $75 Billion by 2020 which would still be less than 10% of the size of overall retail pie. We expect ePayLater to be the preferred payment solution considering that it offers the most exhaustive set of features to customers and merchants alike. We are looking at penetrating the e-commerce space enough before diversifying our portfolio to also include offline payments as well. This gives us a huge headroom and legroom for growth," said Akshat while commenting on the market size.
Recent deals in the space
Earlier this month, CreditVidya had secured $2 million in Series A funding from Kalaari Capital.
Last month, online investment platform Goalwise had raised $1 million from affluent individuals while online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform i2ifunding had secured Rs 2 crore from a group of angel investors.
In April, digital payments firm TranServ Pvt. Ltd had raised $15 million in its Series C round of investment led by venture capital fund IDFC SPICE and consumer electronics maker Micromax Informatics Ltd. The same month, online lending marketplace Deal4Loans had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from a bunch of investors.
Image Source: ShutterStock
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