Embedded finance company Rupifi raises $25m Series A

Speaking about the round, Anubhav Jain, Co-Founder and CEO of Rupifi said, “We are super thrilled to welcome two of the largest global investors onboard. With this current investment from Bessemer Venture Partners and Tiger Global, we plan to build further towards our goal of disrupting B2B Payments and Transactions. Our B2B BNPL is currently operating at some of the category leading B2B marketplaces in India across sectors such as FMCG, Pharma, Fashion, Electronics, Agriculture and Food. Our SME focused Commercial Card provides SMEs flexibility to manage expenses without any cost for shorter periods. With the recent round of funding, we are now moving towards building the complete B2B Checkout Product for Marketplaces and Omni-Channel mobile-first B2B Payments solutions for merchants, distributors and sellers.”

B2B Commerce has seen a wave of digitisation in the past few years with credit becoming an integral part of the B2B Payments ecosystem. Rupifi started with the B2B BNPL Product focusing on the Digital B2B Marketplaces in mid 2020 and has seen explosive growth. Despite the subdued economic activity, Rupifi has managed to record an impressive 50% MoM growth in disbursals in the last 12 months while covering more than 50,000 SMEs. They are working with some marquee Marketplaces such as Flipkart Wholesale, Retailio and Fynd among others. Since Day 1, the priority has been to create scalable growth without compromising on portfolio quality, which is why, despite the pandemic induced uncertainty and disruption, Rupifi’s portfolio continues to be healthy with very low NPA levels.

Talking about their investment in Rupifi, Vishal Gupta, Managing Director of Bessemer Venture Partners said, “We are excited to back Rupifi and Anubhav in their mission to simplify B2B payments including BNPL for B2B marketplace and smaller merchants in a seamless way. B2B Payments and B2B Credit are large problems with Technology being the future to solve these and Rupifi team is building around that keeping the SMEs at the core”.

“We are excited to support Rupifi in their goal of disrupting B2B Payments. We have had the experience of working with more than hundred B2B and SaaS Founders. We understand that globally B2B Payments are broken and largely manual. In the $1 Trillion B2B Commerce and Payments space in India, Rupifi has demonstrated rapid growth and proven product leadership”, said John Curtius from Tiger Global, talking about their investment in Rupifi.

Today, small businesses, particularly SMEs, consistently face issues across different steps of their Transaction Life Cycle, including Invoicing, Payment Reconciliation, Taxation and Accounting. In addition, most SMEs and Businesses, prefer flexible payment terms and shorter-term credit for transaction closure. Rupifi’s technology platform brings B2B marketplaces and financial institutions together to enable low-friction credit for a wide range of small businesses and SMEs at point-of-sale stage. Such transaction backed credit solutions also allow financial institutions to cater to low ticket, high frequency credit needs at low cost, which helps to increase coverage while inherently mitigating credit risk.

For SMEs, Rupifi offers fully digital touchpoints and real-time decisioning throughout the lifecycle – onboarding, application decisioning, real-time transaction and repayment reconciliations. Similarly, marketplaces and financial institutions integrate deeply with Rupifi’s platform using easy to use APIs and SDKs. With increasing acceptance and demand for B2B payment and credit solutions, Rupifi aims to bolster its product suite to create fully digital, integrated and real-time solutions which meet the end-to-end B2B transactions and payments requirements of SMEs. Rupifi will continue to leverage analytics and data-based insights, which will form the backbone for improving credit-decisioning and SME experience.

“The Rupifi team has demonstrated the strength of their proposition by onboarding top tier platforms and rapidly scaling-up SME transactions in just a few months since our initial investment. B2B transactions is a huge opportunity in India and we are delighted to welcome global leaders like Bessemer and Tiger to support Rupifi get to the next level”, said Krishnan Neelakantan, Managing Partner at Ankur Capital.

“B2B transactions and payments is a very fragmented process in India. Rupifi’s tech driven integrated solution resolves these bottlenecks and unlocks value for small businesses. Rupifi’s solution is finding increasing acceptance and adoption amongst top-tier B2B marketplaces and their ecosystems. We are excited to continue backing the Rupifi team in their next stage of growth”, said Varun Malhotra from Quona Capital.