BharatPe gets new investor in Series A round

Digital payments firm BharatPe, which services offline retailers and businesses, has raised $15.5 million (around Rs 107 crore) in a Series A round of funding. US-based investment firm Insight Partners joined existing investors Sequoia Capital and Beenext in the round, BharatPe said in a statement. The fintech start-up, which is owned by Resilient Innovations Pvt. Ltd, said that it will use the fresh capital for scaling up its operations within the next two years. Ashneer Grover, CEO and Co-founder of BharatPe, said: “The funding will fuel our mission of democratising digital payments for merchants, and make UPI a preferred way to pay.” UPI, which stands for Unified Payments Interface, is a real-time mobile payments system for inter-bank transactions. Grover added: “Over the last few months, we have been able to transform payments for over 6,00,000 merchants in India. BharatPe facilitates 10 per cent of overall UPI merchant transactions in the country and accounts for 1 per cent of overall UPI.” The company had previously raised $2 million in seed funding from Sequoia Capital India and Singapore-based VC firm Beenext last October. American Express top executive Sanjay Rishi, PayU co-founder Nitin Gupta, and Pine Labs chief technology officer Nipun Mehra also contributed to that round. New investor Insight Partners is a global venture capital and private equity firm investing in high-growth technology and software companies.