India’s most-valued fintech startup, Razorpay, has bought customer loyalty and rewards management platform PoshVine to allow merchants on its platform to attract customers by offering them personalised rewards through PoshVine’s customer loyalty platform.
Razorpay and PoshVine did not disclose the deal value and any other financial details of the transaction, but the company said that the entire team of PoshVine, including its co-founders, would join Razorpay post the closure of the transaction.
In a virtual interaction with Moneycontrol, Shashank Kumar, co-founder and Managing Director of Razorpay said that the acquisition of PoshVine would enable Razorpay to encourage more interaction between merchants, banks, and consumers by driving additional channels for rewards and driving additional spending digitally.
“PoshVine is dealing with 5,000 merchants. We have lakhs of merchants that can come on board. Credit card as a channel is not exploited to that extent. For a majority of small and medium businesses, every time they want to give out a credit card offer, they need to have a discussion with the banks and then craft the loyalty plan and then market it,” Kumar told Moneycontrol explaining synergies between the two companies after the acquisition.
“What we want to do is leverage the banks and merchants on our platform to help merchants roll out these plans on the grow. It will become faster, merchants can experiment a lot more and they can make it a channel of customer acquisition,” Kumar added.
Founded in 2011 by Garima Satija and Richik Nandi, PoshVine offers payments-linked loyalty and engagement solutions to banks, payment networks, and businesses. The platform develops loyalty and engagement solutions that better engagement experiences for banks, merchants, and customers. PoshVine claims to have partnered with over 20 banks and networks including SBI Card, HDFC Bank, IDFC FIRST Bank, AU Bank, DBS, Visa and American Express across India and Southeast Asia.
According to data available on Tracxn, PoshVine has raised a little under $50,000 to date from MyFirstCheque and angel investor Gautam Sinha. In FY22, PoshVine had clocked revenue of Rs 5.7 crore, and a profit of Rs 50 lakh.
For Razorpay, PoshVine marks its 7th acquisition to date. PoshVine’s acquisition would also enable the payments giant to deepen its presence in the Southeast Asian market, geography that it recently forayed into. In a media interview earlier this year, Harshil Mathur, co-founder and CEO (chief executive officer) of Razorpay had said that the company was keen on expanding its product offerings by exploring acquisitions in various segments.
For instance, last month, Razorpay bought a majority stake in Ezetap, a Point of Sales (PoS) Payments Solution Provider Ezetap, to make offline forays to take on startups like Pine Labs, MSwipe, and Bharape among others.
Founded in 2014 by two IIT Roorkee graduates Mathur and Kumar, Razorpay provides technology payment solutions to various businesses across the country. The company claims to be catering to over 8 million businesses. Razorpay counts YCombinator, Sequoia Capital, MasterCard, Tiger Global, SalesForce Ventures, Matrix Partners, and GIC among others as its backers, and has raised over $740 million to date in equity.
The company was last valued at $7.5 billion in December 2021, when it raised $375 million in its Series F round. Razorpay is among a few profitable unicorns in the country and had clocked a profit of Rs 7 crore in FY21. The company’s revenue had surged to Rs 841 crore during the year. For the calendar year 2021, Mathur had said that the company’s revenue topped Rs 1,000 crore in a media interview.
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