Bangalore-based fintech startup Open Financial Technologies Pvt Ltd (Open), which offers a digital neo-banking service for SMEs, announces its Series A funding of 5 million USD led by Beenext, Speedinvest and 3one4 Capital.
Prior to this, the startup had raised undisclosed amount in May last year, whi was its pre-series A funding led by Unicorn India Ventures and Recruit Co. Ltd, through its investment subsidiary RSP India Fund LLC. Existing investors ISME-ACE and Vaibhav Domkundwar’s BetterCapital AngelList syndicate
Open offers a business account in partnership with banks that helps SMEs
automate and run their finances effectively. The account has all the tools that’s required by a small business to
send and receive business payments combined with an automated bookkeeping tool to
integrate banking into their business workflows.
Founded
in 2017, Open is solving business banking challenges faced by SMEs and the platform
today has grown to over 30,000 SMEs and processing over 2 Billion USD in
transaction run rate adding over 7500 SMEs every month and is the fastest SME
focused neo-banking service globally. Open plans to use the funding to scale up
the team and launch a few new products.
The
series A round was led by Beenext – Asia’s top-tier early-stage fund investing
across SEA, India and Japan. Speedinvest - a leading early stage VC fund in Europe
which also backed leading neo-banks like N26, Holvi and Tide. Existing
investors Unicorn India Ventures and Angellist Syndicate also participated in
this round.
According
to Anish Achuthan, Co-founder & CEO of Open “Banking is broken for
small businesses as traditional business banking services have not focused on
the needs of these businesses. This presents us with a large opportunity
to disrupt this segment in partnership with banks. The funding will help
us accelerate customer acquisition and growth as we target to onboard 1 million
small businesses into the platform in the next two years.
Speaking on the investment, Dirk Van Quaquebeke, Managing Partner, Beenext says, “I have been looking at the neo-banking space globally for the past 5-6 years and must say that I have not seen this kind of growth and robustness of an SME Neo product at this young stage of a company. I am deeply impressed by Anish and his team and what they have achieved in such a short period of time.”
Just a few days back, Beenext had also contributed in $8 million funding round of Smallcase, a Bangalore-based financial technology startup.
Speaking on the investment, Stefan Klestil, General Partner, Speedinvest, said “Tech is enabling the financial inclusion of small businesses everywhere in the world. Based on our track record in Europe, and together with Beenext, our trusted regional partner, we have started to back strong, proven founders like Anish in the Indian market with its practically unlimited growth prospects. We are very excited about our first tech investment in India."
Founded in May 2017, by by serial entrepreneurs Anish Achuthan, Mabel Chacko and Ajeesh Achuthan along with ex-TaxiforSure CFO Deena Jacob, Open has raised investments from Recruit Japan, Unicorn India Ventures, DICE fintech and other angel investors that include Sweta Rau, Citruspay founder Jitendra Gupta, TaxiforSure founder Apremaya Radhakrishnan, Chiranth Patil of BetaPlus Ventures, Archana Priyadarshini of Unicorn India Ventures and Vaibhav Domkudwar’s BetterCapital AngelList Syndicate.