BENGALURU: India’s star start-ups have entered a period of plenty as far as capital is concerned with venture investors remaining bullish on the world’s second largest internet market. Digital payments gateway provider Razorpay, for instance, has raised a fresh $160 million in funding via a Series E round at a valuation of $3 billion, almost tripling this figure in six months.
The payments firm had entered the unicorn club in October 2020 and its userbase and transactions volume have jumped manifold—the company leveraging the digital transformation undertaken by many companies as the transaction economy shifted further online. RazorPay’s fresh funding round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, along with participation from Ribbit Capital and Matrix Partners. It plans to infuse the fund to scale up its business banking suite, invest in new acquisitions and launch in overseas markets.
Pune-based Software as a Service (SaaS) start-up Druva announced a $147 million fund raise from Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), a global investment group, alongside a significant investment by Neuberger Berman, each of which manage more than $300 billion in net assets.Druva, which has doubled its valuation in a year, said that the massive cloud adoption by enterprises gives software companies an advantage in allaying cyber security concerns and help in data migration to new operating models.