Mumbai: Enterprise payments solutions provider Innoviti has raised ₹80 crore in debt from venture debt fund Trifecta Capital and non-banking finance companies (NBFCs), a top company executive said.
Innoviti provides technology-led payment solutions for businesses, and partners with banks, digital wallets and merchants such as retailers. Its clients include Reliance Retail, watchmaker Titan Co., Inox Leisure Ltd and Walmart Inc.
With the enterprise business recently turning profitable, the company aims to focus on new services, founder and CEO Rajeev Agrawal said.
“We want to go from more transactions to richer transactions. By getting data on what the customer wants, we want to start generating layers of data and provide marketing services," Agrawal said over the phone.
Innoviti plans to use the funds for its payments infrastructure and terminals, in addition to technology expansion and hiring people, added Agrawal. It is looking to recruit senior data scientists for data analytics and recently hired people for a data platform team.
“The business is capital-efficient, and the sticky nature of the enterprise payments play combined with the product innovation of Innoviti makes them attractive to us," said Aakash Goel, partner at Trifecta Capital.
Debt funding can improve the return on equity for all shareholders, said Goel, adding it also avoids stake dilution and allows the company to accelerate growth or to get larger milestones with the same amount of equity.
Innoviti raised $18 million equity in a July 2017 Series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, Singapore-based private equity fund SBI-FMO and Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures. Catamaran had also invested $5 million in Innoviti’s Series A round in 2015.
While India’s consumer payments market has seen huge startup growth and investments, led by Paytm and Flipkart-owned PhonePe, business-to-business (B2B) payment startups have also seen strong traction.
Mint reported on 15 February that payment solution provider Pine Labs is in advanced talks to close a funding round of around $75 million from existing investors including Temasek and PayPal, which could make it the latest entrant to India’s coveted unicorn club—startups valued at over a billion dollars.
The corporate payments segment is growing at 20-30% year-on-year with value added services on top of payment acceptance expected to expand the net revenue per dollar payment processed, said Goel. In addition, the enterprise payments business is more sticky, predictable, capital-efficient and has a clearer business model than consumer payments, he added.
