Gurgaon-based DotPe, an offline-to-online commerce platform for businesses, has raised $58 million in its Series B round led by Temasek, the company said on September 19.
The round also saw participation from existing investors PayU, the payments and fintech arm of Prosus, and InfoEdge Ventures, besides new investors Mitsubishi and Naya Capital.
"We are building a full ecosystem for offline merchants to get digitised. We are targeting to grow our merchant base from 7.5 million currently to 20 million in the next two to three years," CEO Shailaz Nag, who was also the founder of PayU, told Moneycontrol after the funding round.
Founded in 2020 by Nag and former PayU executives Gyanesh Sharma and Anurag Gupta, DotPe provides end-to-end solutions for businesses to digitise their online presence from enabling ordering (in-store and remote), online payments, online marketing to delivery.
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Nag said the company would also introduce new financial services products including business-to-business (B2B) neobanking solutions and enable lending for merchants.
Currently, consumer and B2B neobanking platforms like Jupiter, Fi, Niyo, Freo, RazorpayX, Open, etc are not regulated by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
These platforms provide an interface for customers for banking services like savings accounts, debit cards, balance checks with a banking partner providing the services.
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Digital lending, on the other hand, has been recently regulated by the RBI through a formal notification on September 2.
"For neobanking, we will not take any steps until the RBI issues guidelines formally," Nag said.
DotPe's food and beverage merchants include local, national and international brands such as McDonald's, 24 Seven and Taco Bell. The company said its merchant base had grown by over three times since 2020.
Its revenues were growing by over 150 percent year on year and the growth was expected to continue, Nag said.
DotPe's fundraise comes at a time when startups across the board are facing tougher questions from investors on unit economics and profitability as investors turned cautious following a meltdown in tech stocks. This, however, has not stopped Indian fintechs from raising large rounds where investors are bullish on the business models.
"We have been associated with DotPe since its inception and believe in its potential to fundamentally transform daily operations for businesses in India. There are synergies between PayU’s vision for a holistic Indian merchant ecosystem and DotPe’s phenomenal work in digitising this space," Vijay Agicha, Global Head of Strategy and Growth at PayU, said in a statement.
DotPe had last raised $27.5 million in its Series A round in March 2021 led by PayU, InfoEdge Ventures and Google.
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