BENGALURU: Financial services company Razorpay on Tuesday announced its first international foray with the acquisition of a majority stake in Malaysian fintech firm Curlec at a valuation of $20 million.
This is Razorpay's fourth acquisition overall and comes just over a month after raising $375 million in funding.
The Kuala Lumpur-based Curlec is building solutions for recurring payments for businesses of all sizes. E-commerce is booming in Malaysia with an estimated market size of $21 billion in 2021 and an industry report said it is estimated to grow further to over $35 billion by 2025, fuelled by the emergence of new mobile payment methods.
Curlec was founded by two entrepreneurs, Zac Liew and Steve Kucia, in 2018. Curlec currently works with hundreds of businesses across Malaysia, including the insurance company AXA, fintech lending firm Funding Societies and Axiata Digital. Initially backed by 500 Global and other investors, the company's annual revenue has been growing at nearly 5X since 2018.
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Harshil Mathur, CEO and Co-Founder, Razorpay said, "With the vast experience in a heterogenous market like India over the last seven years, our expansion to the Southeast Asia payments market is timed exactly to coincide with the company’s growing dominance in all things payments."
Prior to this, Razorpay acquired TERA Finlabs, (AI-based risk tech SaaS Platform) in 2021, Opfin (Payroll and HR management solution) in 2019 and Thirdwatch (Fraud Analytics AI-platform) in 2018.
Razorpay serves over 8 million businesses including the likes of Facebook, Ola, Zomato, Swiggy, Cred and achieved $60 billion Total Payment Volume (TPV) as of early December 2021. The company clocked over 300% YoY growth, second year in a row and plans to achieve $90 billionTPV by the end of 2022.