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Venture Catalysts, India’s first, largest and pioneering integrated incubator and accelerator platform, has recently widened its investee portfolio by investing an undisclosed amount in Nupay, a next-generation ‘Neo Banking’ business payments platform enabling banking transactions, contextual payments, receivables and payables automation for large enterprises, governments and SMEs. With this investment, Venture Catalysts further strengthens its presence in the FinTech space in India. The funding round also saw the participation of many leading angel investors, including the likes of Mr. Navin Puri, Ex-Country Head Branch Banking, HDFC Bank and Board Member at Equitas, UGrow Capital and Aditya Birla Sun Life AMC, and Mr Vishwadeep Bajaj, CEO and Founder, ValueFirst.
Founded by financial services industry veteran Alok Arora and IIMC alumni Neeraj Singh, Nupay is India’s only neo-banking platform which is tailored to meet the end-to-end A/R and A/P requirements of enterprises. The company leverages bank partnerships (Open APIs), client ERP integration and AI/ML capabilities to automate account receivables and payables which help organizations to reduce the cycle time, improve cash flows and provide seamless bank reconciliation. Nupay has raised the capital as part of its seed funding and it aims to utilize the funds towards geographical expansion and product optimization.
Sharing his insights, Dr. Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, President & Co-founder, Venture Catalysts, said, “As India’s FinTech sector continues to flourish, it is neo-banking that presents the next big opportunity. The global neo-banking market expected to grow up to $394 billion by 2026. India, too, has started to experience the neo-banking revolution. In fact, 50% of the neo-banking startups were founded in 2016-17 and have seen large investments from major VCs and Banks. Parallelly, the Indian digital payments market is expected to reach $ 1 trillion transaction value by 2023. We believe Nupay is perfectly positioned to capitalize on this and help enterprises digitize and automate their banking requirements.”
Speaking on the investment, Alok Arora, Co-founder and CEO, Nupay, commented, “We are delighted to have Venture Catalyst as our investor, this is a validation of our belief in building India’s first Neo banking platform in India focussed on high-value and high-transacting enterprises. We have seen a surge in demand from large and mid-sized clients and banks that are looking at a comprehensive and innovative platform to manage their complex needs and dynamic requirements.”
“Nupay has been a pioneer in automating complete receivable and payables process flows across various industries and varied use cases. We have been actively partnering with banks on their open banking initiative to create a seamless and real-time tech platform. Our focus has been to build a highly scalable and modular product bringing the ecosystem of banking, payments and credit services together through a unified platform.” added Neeraj Singh, Co-founder and COO, Nupay.
Nupay has partnered with leading banking firms like IndusInd Bank and Yes Bank, enabling them to access state-of-the-art technology and bring high levels of transparency into their operations. Its impressive clientele also includes the likes of Yatra, StarAgri and Aditya Birla Capital – companies been processing INR 400 crores of transactions on a monthly basis through Nupay.
Navin Puri, Investor and Ex-Country Head Branch Banking, HDFC Bank, said, “Nupay platform is extremely relevant to the current banking ecosystem, and helps banks to further their Digital and Open Banking initiative. The management team has extensive experience in this area and have been able to build a strong product with many large clients using the platform. I believe that the early success of the company combined with the growth in the industry provides a huge potential for Nupay which they are well-positioned to leverage.”