Coinbase, Pinterest board member joins $1m round of Indian fintech firm

Rupifi, an India-based fintech startup, has raised an additional US$1 million in pre-series A funding from Alteria Capital and Gokul Rajaram, who is a board member of Coinbase and Pinterest. The fresh funds are a mix of venture debt and equity.

In March, the fintech startup had raised US$4.2 million as part of the same round of financing, which also saw participation from Quona Capital, Ankur Capital, and Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal. The total funding raised in the round stands at US$5.2 million.

To date, Rupifi has raised US$6 million in funding.

Rupifi team/Photo credit: Rupifi

Rupifi is also backed by Cred founder Kunal Shah, Livspace co-founder Ramakant Sharma, and BharatPe co-founder Ashneer Grover, among others.

Founded in 2020, Rupifi focuses on business-to-business (B2B) companies across sectors such as fast-moving consumer goods, food, pharma, fashion, electronics, and agriculture.

The startup has integrated its solution with B2B firms to provide services such as buy now, pay later (BNPL) offerings to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as well as interest-free, 14-day credit services. It typically extends credit worth 10,000 rupees (US$134) to 1 million rupees (US$13,460).

Rupifi currently has over 20,000 monthly active SMEs that conduct transactions via its platform. The fintech firm has nearly 100,000 registered members, Anubhav Jain, the company’s co-founder and CEO told Tech in Asia.

He added that the company is aiming to onboard 100,000 monthly active SMEs on its platform by December. It is also looking to have as many as 30 partners from currently 17 partners. Jain said the startup is in active conversations with at least 100 B2B marketplaces.

Jain added that the firm will use the fresh capital to further grow its BNPL service. He is also optimistic that the upcoming festival season in India will deliver more dividends to SMEs, considering the rapid pace of vaccination and declining cases of Covid-19.

“SMEs are quite pumped up about the upcoming festive season. We want to support them with credit. We are looking to aggressively provide credit limits to the SMEs on the B2B platforms,” he said.

Currency converted from Indian rupee to US dollar: US$1 = 74.25 rupees.