BharatPe in final stages to close $17M funding from Sequoia India

In what could become one of the largest Series A funding rounds in India’s startup sector, payments firm BharatPe is in the final stages of closing an investment of around $17 million led by Sequoia Capital India, according to multiple people in the know of the deal.

The latest round is expected to value the payments startup, which is competing with giants Paytm and Flipkart-owned PhonePe, between $60-$65 million, sources said. BharatPe had raised close to $2 million in seed funding led by Sequoia Capital India and Singapore-based BeeNext in October last year, along with participation from American Express top executive Sanjay Rishi, PayU co-founder Nitin Gupta, and PineLabs CTO Nipun Mehra among others.

BharatPe is a QR code based payment app which enables offline merchants to accept digital payments via any service running on the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) directly to the merchant's bank account. It claims to make payment acceptance simple by offering merchants a single interface for all UPI apps such as PayTM, PhonePe, Google Pay, BHIM, Mobikwik, Freecharge, True Caller and 100 other UPI apps.

The company was incorporated last April by former Grofers CTO Ashneer Grover and Shashvat Nakrani. The firm claims to have processed over 70 lakh transactions valued at over Rs 150 crore since then.

BharatPe co-founder Grover declined to comment on the funding round, queries sent to Sequoia Capital India went unanswered until the time of going to press.

Unlike its rivals which want to control both the consumer and merchant payments, BharatPe says it’s only focused helping merchants accept digital payments more easily. The company utilises UPI’s own QR codes to enable payments, offering merchants same-day or instant settlements.

“Month-on-month we’re still growing at 4-5 times the growth of UPI. Right now our focus is on growing our merchant base, but payments is not how we will monetise,” Grover told ET. “We will monetise merchants on the platform by lending to them as a certain portion of their business flows through us and will also get into B2B commerce, not in an inventory led manner, but as a marketplace.”