Singapore-based Panthera Growth Leads $45M Series D Funding in Innoviti

Mr. Rajeev Agarwal, CEO & Founder, Innoviti

Singapore-based growth equity firm Panthera Growth Partners (PGP) is the lead investor in a $45M combination Series D fund-raise by Innoviti Payment Solutions Pvt Ltd, India’s leading Collaborative Commerce Platform.

Panthera has invested $15M from its recently announced Fund II, along with new investors including Alumni Ventures, Patni Family Office and existing investors FMO and Bessemer Venture Partners, Netherlands. Innoviti has also raised debt from Trifecta Capital in this round. A clutch of individual investors such as Sanjoy Bhattacharya, Bharat Jaisinghani, and others also participated in this funding round.

Digital businesses are finding it hard to scale up profitably, Innoviti provides a collaborative commerce platform that helps them collaborate with other businesses and acquire customers together. They can partner to turn payment transactions into new and unique purchase tools that urge consumers to buy better products and more products, right at the point of purchase. Enriching payment channels with data technology, Innoviti’s collaborative commerce platform is ushering in a new wave of sales acceleration tools for digital businesses.

More than 20,000 retailers from 2000 cities participate in Innoviti's platform, which handles more than 90 million unique customers' purchases each year. Innoviti processes over Rs 75,000 Cr. ($10 billion) in annualized purchase volume and holds a commanding market share of > 70% in the enterprise sector. The company offers grocery, fashion, healthcare, and electronics retailers with category-specific purchase solutions. Launched in 2021, Innoviti’s GENIE product for mid-market mobile retailers has seen a runaway success by providing attractive affordability (EMI/BNPL) solutions for consumers. It has already clocked more than Rs. 1000 Cr. of annualized GTV.

The funds raised will be used to expand the company’s mid-market product lines in electronics, fashion, and grocery. It will also be utilized for building products on top of UPI payment channels, enhancing product distribution, and making strategic acquisitions in the marketing technology and data sciences fields. Avendus Capital was the exclusive financial advisor to Innoviti in this transaction.

The company plans to double revenues in 2022–2023. The enterprise division of the company is already profitable, and it expects to reach total break-even within the current financial year.

Rajeev Agrawal, CEO, Innoviti, said, “We are happy to have Panthera join, guide, and support us in our journey of becoming the purchase partner to every Indian. PGP has had a track record of backing highly differentiated businesses that have created lasting value in the Indian start-up ecosystem. We are super excited that they decided to back us and look forward to the same magic here. One needs to design easy-to-use flexibility with military grade reliability and that too at scale for exceptional customer experience, we are proud to have done that. Our four patents, including one US patent are proof of that. This has translated into our collaborative commerce platform powering more than 70% of purchases that happen digitally in enterprise retail today.”

Panthera GP was founded in 2021 and recently announced the first close of its USD 250 million second Fund. Fund I, has backed sector leading companies such as BigBasket, Pepperfry, Zivame, OfBusiness, etc.

Panthera’s Founder and Managing Partner, Shilpa Kulkarni, said, “As a growth-stage investor focused on disruptive technology led businesses, we are excited to partner with Innoviti. Innoviti’s cutting edge solutions help turn simple payment transactions into powerful purchase tools. We look forward to joining Innoviti on the journey to become a purchase partner for every consumer.”

“Our solutions are crafted for Indian retail, building in nuances of Indian consumers and merchants. We are excited about how our platform is helping digital businesses struggling with high costs of conversion (due to higher competition) find new ways of growing profitably. This is a problem not only for Enterprises, but also for Mid-Market businesses who are facing increased competition from large players. This customer centricity and a relentless focus on excellence has helped us become the most capital efficient company in this space. With the current Series D, we hope to become a sustainable business and list on the exchanges over the next couple of years,” Rajeev Agrawal added.

Innoviti Granted Patent on Its Payment Technology Solution for Double Debits in Digital Payments

Patent portfolio expands to 4, with 26 more in pipeline

Double debit is a common problem in payments. It is used to describe a scenario where due to network unreliability the customer's money gets debited for a purchase while the merchant does not get credit. The merchant does not hand over the goods, asking the customer to pay again, leading to a double debit for the customer. The customer chases their bank to reverse the first transaction, leading to inconvenience. This problem is one of the biggest contributors to customer grievance with digital payments. The scenario also leads to erosion of merchant’s confidence with digital payments. Innoviti’s patent provides a technology solution to this.

The patent aims to address the unreliability of mobile networks. Virtually 100% of mobile and web consumer applications send data over TCP/IP networks. TCP/IP, the most common network protocol was designed in the 1970s by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, often called as the fathers of Internet. The protocol was primarily designed for wired networks prevalent at that time. Most modern applications however work on wireless networks, which behave somewhat differently. These applications however use TCP/IP at network level leading to some unusual situations that are the primary cause of this unreliability. Innoviti’s patent aims to address these situations through a novel application layer technology that rides on the same network layer.

Mr. Rajeev Agrawal, CEO & Founder, Innoviti

Innoviti has developed a collaborative commerce platform that enables businesses to partner on payment transactions and turn them into powerful purchase tools that help consumers buy better products and more products. Merchants, banks, and brands come together on Innoviti’s platform to create such purchase tools.

The platform is delivered as software applications that run on payment terminals and mobile and web applications, helping the merchants drive more customers, more sales, and more profits than possible otherwise. This technology will further enhance the reliability of Innoviti’s products, providing a virtually zero error system that will help boost the consumer-merchant purchase experience.

Based on deep consumer insights, Innoviti’s products are crafted using superior technology that has translated into higher GTV per point of purchase than anyone else in the market, and a continuously increasing take rate per $ of GTV. Processing over Rs. 75,000 Cr. of annualized purchase volume, Innoviti’s flagship uniPAYNext product commands a dominant market share of 76% in the large enterprise category, providing category specific purchase tools to grocery, fashion, healthcare, and electronics merchants.

“Innoviti desires to become the purchase partner to every Indian by helping them make better purchase decisions. We do this by developing sophisticated technology and delivering it through simple, exceptionally crafted purchase experiences. This is hard, very hard to put together. Our patents are a demonstration of the sophisticated technology required to deliver such exceptional experiences.

These patents are also a great recognition of the exceptional talent that exists in Innoviti. Further, they not only help us protect our customers against claims by other parties but are also a mechanism for us to deter replication of our technology by competition. The great encouragement and support infrastructure provided by the Government of India to start-ups has been instrumental in our drive to protect technology developed in India. Through these patents, in our own small way, we hope to contribute to the “Make in India, For the World” mission. We have 26 more patents in the pipeline and over the next couple of years plan to increase this to a portfolio of 100+ patents.” – said Mr. Rajeev Agrawal, CEO, Innoviti.

Innoviti had raised a Series D round of Rs. 80 Cr. in December 2020, towards fueling the expansion of its mid-market product GENIE. Within the past few months GENIE has rapidly grown to driving Rs. 1,000 Cr. of annualized GTV that is targeted to grow to Rs. 7000 Cr. over next twelve months. Innoviti’s highly differentiated product strategy backed by modern enterprise grade technology has not only driven a rapid growth trajectory, but also a highly profitable one with gross margins more than 70%. The company’s enterprise business has been EBITDA positive since October 2020.

Innoviti Launches Saadhan POS for Instant UPI and RuPay Acceptance Enablement at B2B Businesses

Leading payment solutions provider, Innoviti Payment Solutions, announced the launch of its new Saadhan POS solution which is specifically designed to provide B2B businesses a quick and convenient packaged option, to become compliant with the recently announced Regulatory requirements that mandate compulsory provision of UPI and RuPay acceptance modes at all businesses with annual turnover exceeding Rs. 50 Cr.

The new Saadhan POS comes pre-enabled to accept both RuPay Debit Cards as well as UPI-QR transactions, enabling B2B businesses to accept payments from their business customers through any of these options. All RuPay debit card and UPI transactions on Saadhan POS will have zero charges. The POS will additionally accept Visa and Master issued credit and debit cards. It will, therefore, provide businesses the benefit of accepting all forms of payments on a single unified POS device, greatly simplifying backend reconciliation of payments. A specially designed benefit of the Saadhan POS solution for merchants, is that it comes pre-packaged with all necessary back-end transaction acquiring arrangements with acquiring banks, thereby enabling the Saadhan POS to be activated for the merchant within 15 minutes, in sharp contrast to existing industry norm of nearly 1-2 weeks.

Additionally, the Saadhan POS is complemented by a convenient mobile phone-based Tracking App that allows the merchant to track his transaction processing and settlement on a real-time basis across both RuPay and UPI transactions. It also provides merchants the additional feature flexibility of processing transaction through either the regular route or as EMI billing transactions.

Speaking about the launch, Ms. Amrita Malik, Chief Business Officer, Innoviti, said, "Consistent innovation to meet rapidly evolving business needs of our merchant partners is at the very core of Innoviti's DNA. The recent regulatory changes making UPI and RuPay Debit acceptance mandatory for specified businesses has created a need amongst our partners for a simple one-stop solution that can be enabled quickly to meet regulatory deadlines. The new Saadhan POS is carefully designed to meet those expectations and we are delighted with the response it is getting from our retailer partners."

Across India, Innoviti processes over US$ 6.5Bn of payments annually from over 1000+ cities, with a throughput per point of acceptance of 7000$, 2X of India's average (as per RBI data). Innoviti's payment solutions help merchants, banks and brands influence commercial transactions happening in offline commerce more efficiently than possible otherwise, through unconventional use of payment terminals.



Innoviti is backed by marquee investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, USA, SBI Venture Capital, Singapore and Catamaran, India.

Innoviti Payment Solutions runs a payment platform that has a unique ability to add intelligence to traditional payment channels, enhancing their value. Merchants, brands and financial service providers use these intelligent payment channels to reduce cost and drive sales of their products. Innoviti processes over Rs. 40,000 Cr. of payment transactions, about 6% of all offline merchant payment transactions in India. This also includes Rs. 1,500 Cr. of transactions involving distribution of loans to consumers and small businesses. The most capital efficient company in this space, Innoviti processes more volume for every $ raised than any other payments company. The company is backed by marquee investors such as Catamaran Ventures, SBI Venture Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Innoviti Raises $18M in Series B Round to Grow its Payments and Lending Businesses

Leading payments company, Innoviti Payment Solutions today announced financing of Rs 120 Crores (~ USD 18 million) to further its vision of digitally organizing the flow of money for businesses across the retail supply chain. The current round was led by the SBI-FMO Fund, Bessemer Venture Partners and existing investor Catamaran. Masterkey Holdings, Bangalore were the exclusive investment bankers to the deal.

Less than 10% of India’s retail payments are currently digital, creating a market opportunity of more than $500 Bn annually. Similarly, the shortfall in supply of funds to SMEs is estimated in excess of $300 Bn and is difficult to solve in the absence of technology-based solutions. Further the Indian market requires a differentiated approach to product design given the communication infrastructure challenges and low levels of awareness about digital technologies. Innoviti has focused on an experience-centric approach to solving these problems through its uniPAY Next and smelending.com platforms. Deep technology has been used to build solutions that work within existing infrastructure constraints to deliver payment processing reliability of more than 96% vs. the industry average at ~80%. Enhanced reliability builds confidence in digital payments with both the consumer and the merchant. Transaction processing time has been brought down to an average of ~2 seconds (vs. industry averages at 7 seconds), thus delivering a superior experience to the customer.

Over the past twelve months Innoviti has also been extending the platform to provide lending solutions for small businesses. Branded as smelending.com, this platform extension provides a frictionless process for addressing the short-term working capital requirements of small businesses. Using technology to automate all aspects of the lending process, the platform enables loans as small as Rs. 30,000 (US$500) for periods as short as 15 days. Designed as an asset light platform, smelending.com connects lenders to small businesses and processes more than 150,000 loans annually for over 30,000 such small businesses.

On the payment processing side, Innoviti has several recent firsts to its credit. These includes a) the launch of faster contactless card acceptance for the first time in multiplexes, b) launch of UPI acceptance in offline retail through its UPI@POS solution in collaboration with NPCI, and c) launch of automated acquirer fallback feature to provide greater payment processing reliability to merchants struggling with store and bank network failures.

The current round of funding will be used to a) aggressively market the uniPAY Next experience to acquire customers looking for greater speed and reliability in their payment acceptance, b) rapid expansion of smelending.com platform to provide working capital loans to kirana stores and brand franchisees and c) expand the product to address payment and lending issues beyond just retail to more businesses across the supply chain.

Innoviti’s payment platforms serve a marquee client base of merchants including Reliance Retail, Titan, Landmark Group, INOX, Indigo, Walmart and several others. Leading banks such as HDFC, ICICI, Axis, SBI, Standard Chartered, Kotak and Citibank use the platform to access customers for processing their payments and distributing to them loans.

“A rapidly growing Indian economy with fledgling infrastructure needs a different approach to delivery of payment solutions. An approach that first focusses on making every transaction happen, and happen fast. Innoviti with its extensive experience and relationships in the payments space has embarked on the journey of delivering to this simple promise of speed and reliability in payments. The current funding from marquee investors is a huge endorsement of our approach and business plan. We believe that our platform is a game changer and are eager to utilize this round of funding to rapidly scale our presence," said Mr. Rajeev Agrawal, CEO, Innoviti.

Image: Rajeev Agrawal, CEO, Innoviti