Mabel Chacko, Co-founder, Open wins ‘Startup leader of the Year’ Award hosted by MEITY and NASSCOM

Mabel Chacko,  a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder of Open, a neobanking platform for SMEs and startups, has been recognized under the ‘Startup leader of the year’ category for the MeitY NASSCOM Women Entrepreneur Awards (Software Product) hosted jointly by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) and NASSCOM.

Presented by Shri. Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Honourable Minister of Electronics and Information Technology, the award recognizes Ms. Chacko’s entrepreneurial spirit and her ability to serve as a guiding role model in the Indian digital era.

On being presented with the award, Ms. Chacko said, “This award truly means a lot to me as it comes after many years of hustling. It’s heartening to see the central government putting such force behind entrepreneurship. The support and encouragement given to entrepreneurs, especially women entrepreneurs, is truly commendable.”

[caption id="attachment_136686" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Mabel Chacko with other winners of MeitY NASSCOM Women Entrepreneur Awards[/caption]

Founded in 2017, Open recently received USD 30 million in a Series B round, led by Tiger Global Management and Tanglin Venture Partners Advisors. The Open platform today has already grown to over 200,000 SMEs and processing over USD 6.5 billion in annualized transactions. The platform also adds over 35,000 SMEs every month, making it the fastest growing SMB focused neobanking service globally.

MeitY Start-up Hub (MSH) has been setup in the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY). MSH act as national coordination, facilitation and monitoring centre that will integrate all the incubation centres, start-ups and innovation related activities of MeitY. Women Entrepreneur Awards is a remarkable mission to celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit of women in India.

 

Fintech Startup Open raises ₹210 Crores from Tiger Global in Series B round

Fintech start-up Open, which offers a business banking service for SMEs and start-ups, has raised INR 210 crores (USD 30 million) in a Series B round. The funding was led by Tiger Global Management and saw participation from Tanglin Venture Partners Advisors. Existing investors 3one4 Capital, Speedinvest and BetterCapital AngelList Syndicate also participated in the round.

Open plans to use the funding to scale up the team, launch more products & value-added services and expand its reach to 1 million SMEs in the next one year. Open is immediately set to launch two new products to enhance its business banking proposition; the Open+ card, a business credit card with a 30-day interest-free credit line, for venture backed start-ups and Layer, a unique programmable bank account for developers.

Founded in 2017, Open is solving business banking challenges faced by SMEs and start-ups. Open offers a business account in partnership with banks which helps businesses automate and run their finances effectively. This business account has all the tools that helps businesses send and receive payments combined with the automated bookkeeping tool to integrate banking into their business workflows. The Open platform today has already grown to over 1 lakh SMEs and processing over INR 35,000 crores in transaction. The platform also adds over 20000 SMEs every month, making it the fastest growing SME focused neo-banking service globally.

The new business banking product from the Open stable and the Open+ business credit card will be offered to help start-ups who are currently being ignored by traditional credit companies. The card comes with an integrated end-to-end expense management platform that enables businesses to issue physical or virtual cards to their employees with custom spend limits and seamless expense filing.

Open is also enhancing its API banking suite with the introduction of Layer - a programmable bank account that will enable developers to control money programmatically, build their own features on top of the bank account and securely integrate with other services.

Anish Achuthan, Co-Founder & CEO, Open

Commenting on the funding, Anish Achuthan, CEO, Open said, “Being one of the fastest growing SME neo-banking platforms in the world, the key is to match the ever-increasing customer demand for seamless financial management. For this, we have to scale up the technology and our team. This funding will help us accelerate our target of simplifying business banking for more than 1 million businesses at a greater pace and also launching new products like the Open+ card and Layer that will enhance our value proposition for small businesses”.

Open Financial Technologies Pvt Ltd (www.bankopen.co) is a neo-banking startup based in Bangalore. Open is founded by serial entrepreneurs Anish Achuthan, Mabel Chacko and Ajeesh Achuthan along with ex-TaxiforSure CFO Deena Jacob.

Anish and Mabel have over a decade of experience in building disruptive fintech startups like branchless-banking startup Cashnxt (2009), NFC-payment startup Neartivity (2011), and developer payment platform Zwitch(2014). The entrepreneur-couple’s previous venture Zwitch was acquired by CitrusPay in September 2015. Prior to Open, Anish was VP (New Initiatives) and Business Head at CitrusPay and PayU. Mabel was heading Marketing and SMB acquisition for CitrusPay and PayU. Open operates through an 85-member team based out of Bangalore and has offices in Mumbai and New Delhi.

Open was founded in May 2017 and has previously raised investments from Beenext, Speedinvest, Recruit Japan, Unicorn India Ventures, DICE fintech and other angel investors that include Citruspay Founders Amrish Rau and Jitendra Gupta, TaxiforSure founder Apremaya Radhakrishna, Chiranth Patil of BetaPlus Ventures, Archana Priyadarshini of Unicorn India Ventures and Vaibhav Domkudwar through BetterCapital AngelList Syndicate.

Tiger Global Management, LLC is an investment firm that deploys capital globally. The firm's fundamentally oriented investments focus primarily on the global Internet, software, financial technology, consumer and industrial sectors. The private equity strategy has a ten-year investment horizon and targets growth-oriented private companies. Such investments have included Spotify, Harry's, Warby Parker, Peloton, JD.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yandex, Mail.ru Group, Despegar, Ola and Flipkart. The public equity efforts emphasize deep due diligence on individual companies and long-term secular themes. Tiger Global Management, LLC was founded in 2001 and is based in New York with affiliate offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangalore and Melbourne.

Neo-banking Startup Open Raises $5 Mn from Beenext, Speedinvest and 3one4 Capital

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.

Fintech Startup 'Open' Partners with ICICI Bank to Automate Accounting for SMEs

Imagine a world where your business current account was your accounting software. Imagine not having to chase payments with UTR numbers, where payments auto-reconcile, and accounting is something that happens automatically as you do your business. 

Open Financial Technologies Pvt. Ltd (Open), a neobanking fintech startup has partnered with ICICI Bank to launch an integrated payments platform for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise (MSME) customers. This integration enables ICICI Bank’s current account holders to securely connect their bank account with the ‘Open’ platform and undertake an array of digital transactions like invoicing, online payments, vendor payouts as well as accounting through a single platform. The integration also enables businesses to automatically reconcile banking and accounting entries to generate profit & loss statements, balance sheets and expense reports, thereby offering MSMEs with better insights into their financial transactions.

This partnership between ICICI Bank and ‘Open’ will enable MSME customers to experience ‘connected banking’ which helps businesses to eliminate the need for manual data entry, automate banking functions like invoicing, payments and reconciliation on a single platform as well as facilitate payments to vendors/suppliers directly through the accounting platform.

Talking about the partnership, Mr. Pankaj Gadgil, General Manager and Head of Business Banking, ICICI Bank said, “ICICI Bank has always pioneered in bringing digital innovations to provide world-class banking experience to its customers. In keeping with this legacy, we are delighted to partner with Open Financial Technologies to bring forth an integrated solution which aims to offer MSME customers with unparalleled convenience. This is a testament to our constant effort at promoting the concept of ‘connected banking’ wherein we aim to bring together various banking functions like raising invoices, making payments and reconciliation on a common platform. We believe, this proposition will help businesses to draw deeper insights about their financial transactions, thereby helping them take business decisions in a seamless manner.”

According to Anish Achuthan, Co-founder & CEO, Open Financial Technologies Pvt. Limited, “Banking and accounting is closely connected with each other; however, the current banking and accounting systems are separate resulting in business owners having to spend a lot of time and effort in getting their finances right. We are excited to partner with ICICI Bank, which is one of the leaders in  business banking, to tap on their expertise and wide network to helps thousands of small businesses automate their finances”.

As a part of the alliance, Open will create awareness about the integrated platform to prospective SMEs digitally. The service will also be available to existing current account customers of ICICI Bank who can access the platform through their Corporate Internet Banking portal. Businesses can access the platform by registering on the Open website, while existing ICICI Bank users can easily connect their bank account to the Open platform through their internet banking portal. 
 Benefits of the Open–ICICI Bank integration:

• Businesses can undertake banking transactions such as invoicing, payments and re-conciliation through a single platform



• Facilitates auto-reconciliation of bank transfers, cash and cheque payments



• Allows bulk pay-outs within a few minutes.



• Enables online payments through an integrated payment gateway



• It helps in automatically categorizing payments into income and expense categories



• Offers access to an integrated expense management tool that offers insights into financial transactions

Founded in 2017 the startup processes over 730 crores in transactions and adds about 7500 SMEs every month on the platform. Open aims to serve 1 lakh businesses and process USD1 Billion in transactions by 2019. The startup is founded by serial entrepreneurs Anish Achuthan, Mabel Annie Chacko and Ajeesh Achuthan along with former TaxiForSure CFO, Deena Jacob.

Anish and Mabel have previously built fintech startups Zwitch (Acquired by Citrus Pay), Neartivity Wireless and Cashnxt. They have also previously been a part of the senior management team at PayU India and Citrus Pay.

In May this year, Open raised Pre-Series A Funding from Recruit group Japan, Unicorn India Ventures, ISME ACE and the initial investors include Amrish Rau (CEO & MD, Payu India), Jitendra Gupta (MD, PayU India) and Apremaya Radhakrishnan (Co-founder, TaxiforSure).

Fintech Startup 'Open' Partners with ICICI Bank to Automate Accounting for SMEs

Imagine a world where your business current account was your accounting software. Imagine not having to chase payments with UTR numbers, where payments auto-reconcile, and accounting is something that happens automatically as you do your business. 

Open Financial Technologies Pvt. Ltd (Open), a neobanking fintech startup has partnered with ICICI Bank to launch an integrated payments platform for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise (MSME) customers. This integration enables ICICI Bank’s current account holders to securely connect their bank account with the ‘Open’ platform and undertake an array of digital transactions like invoicing, online payments, vendor payouts as well as accounting through a single platform. The integration also enables businesses to automatically reconcile banking and accounting entries to generate profit & loss statements, balance sheets and expense reports, thereby offering MSMEs with better insights into their financial transactions.

This partnership between ICICI Bank and ‘Open’ will enable MSME customers to experience ‘connected banking’ which helps businesses to eliminate the need for manual data entry, automate banking functions like invoicing, payments and reconciliation on a single platform as well as facilitate payments to vendors/suppliers directly through the accounting platform.

Talking about the partnership, Mr. Pankaj Gadgil, General Manager and Head of Business Banking, ICICI Bank said, “ICICI Bank has always pioneered in bringing digital innovations to provide world-class banking experience to its customers. In keeping with this legacy, we are delighted to partner with Open Financial Technologies to bring forth an integrated solution which aims to offer MSME customers with unparalleled convenience. This is a testament to our constant effort at promoting the concept of ‘connected banking’ wherein we aim to bring together various banking functions like raising invoices, making payments and reconciliation on a common platform. We believe, this proposition will help businesses to draw deeper insights about their financial transactions, thereby helping them take business decisions in a seamless manner.”

According to Anish Achuthan, Co-founder & CEO, Open Financial Technologies Pvt. Limited, “Banking and accounting is closely connected with each other; however, the current banking and accounting systems are separate resulting in business owners having to spend a lot of time and effort in getting their finances right. We are excited to partner with ICICI Bank, which is one of the leaders in  business banking, to tap on their expertise and wide network to helps thousands of small businesses automate their finances”.

As a part of the alliance, Open will create awareness about the integrated platform to prospective SMEs digitally. The service will also be available to existing current account customers of ICICI Bank who can access the platform through their Corporate Internet Banking portal. Businesses can access the platform by registering on the Open website, while existing ICICI Bank users can easily connect their bank account to the Open platform through their internet banking portal. 
 Benefits of the Open–ICICI Bank integration:

• Businesses can undertake banking transactions such as invoicing, payments and re-conciliation through a single platform



• Facilitates auto-reconciliation of bank transfers, cash and cheque payments



• Allows bulk pay-outs within a few minutes.



• Enables online payments through an integrated payment gateway



• It helps in automatically categorizing payments into income and expense categories



• Offers access to an integrated expense management tool that offers insights into financial transactions

Founded in 2017 the startup processes over 730 crores in transactions and adds about 7500 SMEs every month on the platform. Open aims to serve 1 lakh businesses and process USD1 Billion in transactions by 2019. The startup is founded by serial entrepreneurs Anish Achuthan, Mabel Annie Chacko and Ajeesh Achuthan along with former TaxiForSure CFO, Deena Jacob.

Anish and Mabel have previously built fintech startups Zwitch (Acquired by Citrus Pay), Neartivity Wireless and Cashnxt. They have also previously been a part of the senior management team at PayU India and Citrus Pay.

In May this year, Open raised Pre-Series A Funding from Recruit group Japan, Unicorn India Ventures, ISME ACE and the initial investors include Amrish Rau (CEO & MD, Payu India), Jitendra Gupta (MD, PayU India) and Apremaya Radhakrishnan (Co-founder, TaxiforSure).

Neo-Banking Startup Open Raises Pre-Series A Funding from Unicorn India Ventures, Others

Fintech startup Open, which offers a digital banking service for small businesses, announces 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 also participated in the round.

The startup had earlier raised investments from Citrus Pay founders Amrish Rau & Jitendra Gupta, TaxiforSure founder Apremaya Radhakrishnan, Chiranth Patil of BetaPlus Ventures, Archana Priyadarshini of Unicorn India Ventures and Vaibhav Domkudwar’s BetterCapital AngelList Syndicate.

Founded in May 2017 by serial entreprenuers Anish Achuthan, Mabel Chacko and Ajeesh Achuthan along with ex-TaxiforSure CFO Deena Jacob, Open offers a digital current account in partnership with banks that offers all the features of a traditional bank account with integrated tools to automate finances for small businesses. The account has all the tools that’s required by a small business to send and receive payments combined with an AI based accounting engine, that automates bookkeeping and expense management.

Apart from enabling the businesses to run their finances effectively, the platform also offers an APIs for developers to integrate banking and payments into their business workflows. The startup which has about 1000 customers is also getting ready to launch an innovative business expense card with an attached credit-line called DUO for enabling pay-outs and employee expense management for employees. Open has currently partnered with 7 Banks for powering the banking services on the platform.

According to Anish Achuthan, Co-founder & CEO of Open, “Banking is broken for the 51 million 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 2 lakh small businesses into the platform in the next two years. Further the funding will be used to enhance our core platform to launch new products on lending and wealth management using AI and financial analytics.”

Speaking on the investment, Archana Priyadarshini, Partner, Unicorn India Ventures says, “Fintech in India is one of the fastest growing sectors because technology can play an enabler in taking banking solutions at affordable rates to the unbanked population. Open’s business model of extending traditional banking services through digital route is a unique proposition within fintech and this prompted us to lead the round.”

What is Neo-Banking

A Neo-Bank is an institution that provides checking, a prepaid debit card and some form of savings account without the traditional brick-and-mortar buildings or put simply, a ‘neobank’ is a bank sitting on a 100% digital and mobile platform (so no branches). It usually includes features like mobile deposits, P2P payments, mobile budgeting tools and real-time digital receipts.

In India, Neobanks are relatively new concept and Paytm Payments Bank, Fino Payments Bank, DigiBank (India) by DBS and Open are few neobanks operating in India. Open claims that it is Asia's first neobank for SMEs

Bengaluru Based Fintech Startup Open Secures $250k From PayU India CEO and MD

Fintech startup Open has bagged $250k in a seed funding round led by PayU India CEO Amrish Rau and managing director Jitendra Gupta. The firm plans to utilise freshly infused funds for branding and expansion of the 12-member team.cp_two_third]text[/cp_two_third]

Set to launch in August 2017, Open is co-founded by Anish Achuthan and his wife, Mabel Chacko in May 2017.Open is all set to offer digital banking, bookkeeping, invoicing and other services to micro-entrepreneurs. Earlier in 2015, Achuthan and Chacko had founded Zwitch, a payment startup which was acquired by Citrus Pay.Commenting on the development, Amrish Rau told ET, "Small businesses and entrepreneurs have started moving to app-based banking, and Open offers a whole range of services.

Commenting on the development, Amrish Rau told ET, "Small businesses and entrepreneurs have started moving to app-based banking, and Open offers a whole range of services.The company is tying up with a private bank for backend account

The company is tying up with a private bank for backend account servicing and has also partnered with a GST Suvidha provider (GSP) to offer small businesses help in filing invoices under the new GST regime. The company will also tie up with an NBFC to offer lending products to these businesses.

"We want to provide a complete solution for micro-entrepreneurs, freelancers and startups with only a handful of employees to manage their business banking and also offer analytics. We aim to reach about 10,000 such small entrepreneurs in six months," concludes Achuthan.