Rapyd Ventures backs Indian fintech-as-a-service startup Decentro • TechCrunch
India’s Decentro, the Y Combinator-backed startup that helps companies enter the fintech market by deploying its APIs, has raised $4.7 million in a Series A round.
The Bengaluru-based startup offers banking and payment APIs that allow the development of fintech products such as banking, payment cards, neobanking and collections and payout services in a short period of time. Decentro has partnered with a number of industry players including Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Yes Bank, Visa, RuPay, Quickwork, Equifax, Aadhaar and National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) to provide codeless prepaid payment instrument solutions workflows, call banking via WhatsApp and enables document verification and KYC process.
“When a fintech startup or company wants to launch a new product on the market, it takes them at least a few months to launch. And it has nothing to do with the banking processes, the way the bank runs the process, as well as the bank’s technology. It’s not that great. That’s really the problem we’re solving,” said Rohit Taneja, co-founder and CEO, Decentro, in an interview with TechCrunch.
Taneja, who previously co-founded social payments platform Mypoolin, which was acquired by Cupertino-based financial services company Wibmo, and spent eight years in the fintech market, co-founded Decentro with Pratik Daukhane in 2020 – after personally meeting all the problems. he wants to record. He considers Cashfree and PineLabs-owned Setu among the startup’s main competitors, but believes it differentiates itself with “solution-driven enterprise customers” and “superior” product experience.
The start-up has already gathered over 250 customers in trade and fintech. Some of these include Freo, Mobile Premier League, FamPay, CreditWise, Uni Cards and BharatX.
Decentro, which employs over 40 people, offers products to allow companies to create virtual, business and escrow accounts, enable payments and provide lending. The available products comply with all the latest regulations in the country, the startup said.
The Series A round with Decentro is led by Rapyd Ventures, the venture arm of the UK fintech-as-a-service giant, along with participation from Leonis VC and Uncorrelated Ventures. Indian angel investors including CRED founder Kunal Shah, Groww co-founder and CEO Lalit Keshre, Gupshup co-founder and CEO Beerud Sheth and former CBO of BharatPe Pratekk Agarwaal also participated in the funding round.
Taneja told TechCrunch that the startup aims to use the new funding to deepen its partnership with banks and enter categories including large enterprises. It also plans to acquire licenses and launch in Singapore to expand beyond India eventually.
“Building its innovation team in India first gives Decentro a great base to build scalable innovations that can expand as other emerging markets modernize their own infrastructure. We are excited to support Decentro as they scale and expand,” said Joel Yarbrough, MD of Rapyd Ventures and Rapyd’s VP for Asia Pacific, in a prepared statement.
Prior to the latest funding round, Decentro had raised a total of $1.7 million in seed and angel rounds. The seed round, which closed in October 2020, included investments from Y Combinator and FundersClub.
Since then, the startup claims its value has increased by 3.3X and its revenue has grown by more than 35X. However, Taneja did not disclose any details about the valuation.
Dcentro’s API transaction volume has also grown by 50 to 70% every quarter since early 2021, with an average of 70 million annual API transactions recorded over the past 12 months, it said. The start-up is also profitable, said the co-founder.
