Indian offline-to-online commerce platform DotPe has reportedly raised $58 million in a Series B round and said it plans to add B2B financial services to its offerings.
The company also said it plans to use the new investment to triple the number of merchants using the platform over the next two or three years, after that number tripled over the previous three years, Money Control reported Monday (Sept. 19).
“We are building a full ecosystem for offline merchants to get [digitized],” DotPe CEO Shailaz Nag said in the report. “We are targeting to grow our merchant base from 7.5 million currently to 20 million in the next two to three years.”
DotPe was founded in 2020 and currently supplies solutions that help businesses enable ordering both in-store and remotely, online payments, online marketing and delivery, according to the press release.
With the new funding, it plans to add new financial services such as B2B neobanking solutions and lending for merchants, per the release.
Vijay Agicha, global head of strategy and growth at PayU, which is an existing investor that also participated in the latest funding round, said in the report, “We have been associated with DotPe since its inception and believe in its potential to fundamentally transform daily operations for businesses in India. There are synergies between PayU’s vision for a holistic Indian merchant ecosystem and DotPe’s phenomenal work in [digitizing] this space.”
Microbusinesses and small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are key to India’s economy, yet they have difficulty accessing financing, KredX CEO Manish Kumar told PYMNTS in an interview posted in January.
Read more: India’s Supply Chain Ecosystem Gains New Financing Options
“If given an option, the companies will want to buy products mostly on credit, as they can then first sell their product and then pay it back, else it creates a problem for them to scale as fast as they need lots of capital to continue buying,” Kumar said.
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