Easebuzz Raises $4 Mn In Seed Round From 8i Ventures, Varanium Capital And Guild Capital Funding will be used to strengthen the product team, enhance sales and marketing efforts and offer more payment APIs and solutions for small and mid-size enterprises

B2B-focused API-driven full-stack payments solution Easebuzz Pvt. Ltd on Thursday announced to have secured a $4 million funding as part of its Seed round led by 8i ventures, Varanium Capital and Guild Capital. Former Citrus Pay founders Amrish Rau and Jitendra Gupta also participated as investors in this round. Vertices Partners represented Easebuzz as their legal advisors for the transaction.

The current round of funding will be used to strengthen the product team, enhance sales and marketing efforts and offer more payment APIs and solutions for small and mid-size enterprises.

"From inception, our product DNA was designed around removing friction out of every collection touch-point for an Indian SME. This mindset has allowed us to emerge as the most preferred payment partner today for our MSME customers. This current financing round will help us accelerate our mission of powering digital collections and payments for every retail business in India," said Rohit Prasad, managing director, Easebuzz.

Incubated by Symbiosis Center for entrepreneurship and innovation in the year 2017, Easebuzz is a payments infrastructure company that powers digital collections and payments for India's $800B retail economies. COVID has made it unwieldy for India's 60 million SMEs to manage door-to-door collections of cash and cheques from their customers.

"Rohit and his team have built an exceptional payments business that has profitably scaled to billions of dollars of transactions per year, with no outside capital till now. We are delighted to be the first institutional investors in Easebuzz along with Varanium Capital and Guild Capital. India's $800 billion retail economies is going hyper-digital and Easebuzz is the best-positioned payments player to take advantage of this massive market opportunity," stated Vikram Chachra, founding partner, 8i Ventures.

Over the last year, tens of thousands of small businesses in India have seamlessly upgraded collections from cash to digital, using Easebuzz's automated collection and payment solutions. As a result, the company has emerged as the fastest-growing payments infrastructure player in India, with a twelvefold growth in revenues and gross transaction value. Easebuzz currently processes nearly $3 billion of transactions a year and expects to hit a $10 billion annual run-rate in the coming year. This is the first funding round for Easebuzz, which has been bootstrapped and profitable for the last 3 years, the company shared.

"Growing digitization of merchants driven by lockdowns and government policies favoring financial inclusion have triggered an inflection point for the digital payment ecosystem in India. We are happy to partner with Easebuzz and believe that its strong team and SME focus will leverage this trend to accelerate the growth of online-driven businesses in India," added Apoorv Gautam, India head and chief operating officer, Guild Capital.

In the forthcoming years, Easebuzz is looking forward to developing new suits of services on its platform which will help businesses to further scale on digital remittances and collections.

The payment gateway aggregator market in India is expected to grow from the current INR 9.5 trillion to about INR 22.6 trillion in a transaction worth by FY 25, according to a research report by RedSeer Consulting.