Indian mobile payment startup Ezetap has raised $23m in fresh funding from existing investors Social+Capital, a California-based venture capital fund, Helion Advisors, and Berggruen Holdings.
The existing investors were joined by Horizons Ventures, the private investment arm for Li Ka-Shing, and the Capricorn Investment Group in this round.
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Social+Capital founder and managing partner Chamath Palihapitiya will become chairman of board.
Palihapitiya said: "India is uniquely positioned to build an entirely new financial services ecosystem thanks to advancements like UID. Moreover, it’s clear to us that this revolution will be mobile first – from mPOS to mobile wallets, and that Ezetap is the only company who can seamlessly and agnostically supports this fast changing landscape."
The Ezetap solution turns any merchant’s mobile device into an intelligent point of sale that is able to read any type of card and complete any type of financial transaction – from a credit card sale to a real-time bill payment, to an ATM cash withdrawal or deposit.
The four-year-old firm is adding 500 merchants a week on their platform and intends to reach more than 200,000 merchants by 2016.
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By GlobalDataIt is processing transactions worth over $1m per day and has a customer base ranging from the most well known enterprises to tens of thousands of small retail businesses.
Ezetap co-founder and CEO Abhijit Bose said: "Our vision is to be the most preferred, lowest cost, and universal platform through which businesses transact and engage with their customers. This funding, along with Chamath’s active guidance from scaling Facebook, gives us the fuel to help Ezetap realize our vision and massive potential.
"What makes MPOS unique is that every Ezetap mobile application being used by a merchant is configurable and smart. This is a fundamental change from the way payments have worked for decades and why it never scaled in India. Not only can we easily enable a storekeeper anywhere in the country to accept all forms of payments and increase their sales, we can actually turn his or her small shop into a bill payment center, eGovernment service point, full service bank branch, and much more with only a few keystrokes in Bangalore."
