• The Series A funding round was led by South Korea-based venture capital firm, Smilegate Investment.
• The company intends to utilize the funds to grow its talent pool & further expand the reach of its API banking platform.

Cashfree, a Bengaluru-based payment gateway firm, has reportedly raised over $5.5 million (approximately INR 38 crore) in a Series A financial funding round that was led by South Korea-based venture capital firm, Smilegate Investment. Reports cite, apart from Smilegate Investment, the company’s existing investor, California-based seed accelerator, Y Combinator also participated in the Series A funding round. Moreover, notable investors such as former UK Finance Minister, George Osborne and former Cholamandalam Investment MD, Vellayan Subbiah also partook in the funding round. According to a report by Business Standard, the company intends to utilize the funds to grow its talent pool & further expand the reach of its API banking platform, Payouts, which allows businesses to send money to bank accounts through cards & Unified Payments Interface (UPI) instantly round-the-clock without having to worry about uploading complicated files on their respective corporate banking portals. The Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder of Cashfree, Akash Sinha stated that the company has been growing by over 25% on a monthly basis over the previous 12 months. Sinha further added that the Cashfree API banking platform is capable of connecting any organization’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool or software product to a banking system for carrying out automated transactions. Back in 2017, Cashfree had raised funding from a pre-Series A round that was led by Y Combinator as well as other company investors. The company was incubated at digital payments company, PayPal. According to reports, over 12,000 businesses use company’s services and it counts firms such as Tencent, Xiaomi, Zomato & Exxon Mobil in its list of customers.