DotPe Pvt. Ltd, a payments company set up by PayU India co-founder Shailaz Nag last year, said on Thursday it has raised around $8 million (Rs 56.8 crore) in its seed round of funding.
The round was led by payments company PayU and Chinese conglomerate Fosun International, the startup said in a statement. Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, and top PayU executive Amrish Rau also invested.
Separately, Naukri.com parent Info Edge (India) Ltd said in a filing with the stock exchanges that its Info Edge Venture Fund has put in Rs 10.4 crore ($1.45 million) for a 7.48% stake in the startup, which operates under the Dot brand.
Nag had started Dot after leaving PayU, which had acquired Citrus Pay in 2016 and rebranded it as PayU India.
Dot was incorporated in May last year. It helps offline businesses in online catalogue discovery, in-store ordering, deeper customer engagement, and online payments.
PayU India CEO Anirban Mukherjee said that, with this investment in Dot, PayU aims to play a pivotal role in helping offline merchants with their digitization journey.
Dot joins a bunch of financial-technology startups that have attracted investor interest. Companies in the segment seek to address the growing need for the last-mile delivery of financial services and provide value-added services to consumers across all socio-economic segments.
Last month, Bengaluru-based consumer lending platform MoneyTap raised Rs 500 crore in equity and debt funding. Also in January, artificial intelligence-based wealth management venture INDwealth secured around Rs 87 crore in its Series C funding round. The startup was set up by Ashish Kashyap, the founder of travel platform Ibibo.
Investors
PayU is part of the portfolio of Prosus, which went public in September last year after being spun off from South African technology conglomerate Naspers.
In India, PayU’s main investment was Citrus Pay, which it acquired for $130 million in 2016. Since then, PayU’s total India fintech investment has gone past the $500 million mark, the company says.
Its other investments include bets on Fisdom and ZestMoney. Last month, PayU bought digital consumer credit startup Paysense in its largest India acquisition. PayU had first bought a stake in Paysense in July 2018 when it led an $18 million Series B funding round in the company.
Fosun International has been quite an active investor in India. It has invested in a dozen companies in the country including Delhivery, Kissht, Ixigo, MakeMyTrip and LetsTransport.
Info Edge floated the VC fund just last month with an initial corpus of Rs 100 crore to invest in tech and tech-enabled companies.
Earlier this week, the fund marked its debut investment with a deal to pump money into Qyuki, a venture co-founded by music composer AR Rahman, film director Shekhar Kapur and angel investor Samir Bangara.
The typical sweet spot of the fund is between $500,000 and $5 million, though it may also invest outside this range. Prior to the launch of this fund, Info Edge had been actively investing in startups on its own. It is likely to continue making investments outside the fund as well.
Info Edge’s showpiece investment is in food delivery and restaurant search platform Zomato, which last month acquired Uber Technologies Inc.'s food delivery business, Uber Eats, in India.
Info Edge also has a stake in online insurance aggregator Policybazaar, another unicorn with a billion-dollar valuation. It has also invested in ed-tech venture NoPaperForms and business-to-business e-commerce platform ShopKirana, among others.
