New Delhi, April 7 -- Private equity firm Kedaara Capital has led a $60 million (Rs 515 crore) round of investment in Bengaluru-headquartered payment infrastructure firm Juspay.
Existing investors SoftBank and Accel also joined the Series D funding round, Kedaara said in a statement. The round was a combination of primary and secondary investments, it said.
The valuation of the company couldn't be ascertained. A spokesperson for Kedaara Capital declined to comment.
According to a separate disclosure, Stockholm-listed fintech investor VEF AB sold a part of its stake in Juspay as part of the secondary transaction for $14.8 million. This equates to an internal rate of return (IRR) of 37% and cash on cash return of 4x. VEF still holds a 7.8% stake in one of its "top-performing portfolio companies", it said.
Juspay, which provides payment infrastructure for enterprises and banks, will use the fresh capital to support growth of its open-source payments orchestration platform and plans to advance its AI capabilities.
"As we expand our global footprint and push the boundaries of AI, we remain committed to building truly open source and interoperable payment systems that embrace the growing diversity in the payments landscape," said Sheetal Lalwani, co-founder and COO of Juspay.
The latest funding comes more than three years after Juspay secured $60 million in a Series C funding round led by Softbank Vision Fund 2, which pushed the company's valuation to $460 million.
Last year, VEF marked up the valuation of its stake in Juspay by 12.5% during the quarter ended September 30, which likely valued the company at around $770-780 million.
The new round comes at a time when payments firms Razorpay, PhonePe and Cashfree Payments have in recent months paused their third-party integrations with Juspay, in a bid to route transactions through their own payment gateways, according to media reports.
Juspay, however, said the reports were "factually incorrect". "We are a TSP (technology service provider) to the merchants, similar to how they use the cloud and infrastructure SaaS services. It is the merchants who partner with Juspay Orchestrator and PAs (Payment Aggregators) separately," the company said in a blog post.
Juspay was founded in 2012. It provides payment solutions to companies across sectors such as financial services, ecommerce, quick commerce and travel. It remained bootstrapped until 2015, when it raised Series A funding from venture capital firm Accel.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from VC Circle.