State Bank Of India Invests Undisclosed Amount In Digital Payments Startup Cashfree

Country’s biggest lender State Bank of India (SBI) has invested in digital payments and banking technology Bengaluru-based startup Cashfree. However neither SBI nor Cashfree have disclosed the amount. 

The investment has come close on the heels of the startup raising $35 million in November 2020 in Series B funding from Apis Growth Fund II and Y Combinator.

“The investment from India’s largest bank shows its trust in Cashfree’s innovation and the way we are rapidly scaling up the payments business. This also underscores Cashfree’s role towards building a payments ecosystem that enables the fastest and easiest way to collect payments and make payouts for growing businesses,” said co-founder & CEO of Cashfree, Akash Sinha.

Cashfree provides a full-stack payments solutions platform enabling over one lakh growing businesses in India and across the globe to accept and disburse payment online through a single integration. It has customers such as Nykaa, Zomato, BigBasket and Delhivery on board, providing solutions such as ecommerce payment collection, vendor payments and marketplace settlements.

Y-Combinator backed Cashfree has so far doubled its user base since the eruption of the Coronavirus pandemic and has over 100,000 merchants making over two million transactions daily on the platform.

Some of the leading platforms like Nykaa, Delhivery, Zomato, CRED, Acko and Shell use Cashfree’s payment processing platform for payments and e-marketplace settlements. It also counts Xiaomi, Tencent, Zoomcar, Club Factory, Google-backed Dunzo as well as donation platforms like Ketto and Milaap amongst its customers.

Cashfree was launched in 2015 as a payment gateway. In mid-2016, Cashfree decided to work on building a dedicated bulk Payouts solution for businesses operating in India.

The company works with banks such as ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank and Yes Bank to build the core payments and banking infrastructure.