India’s 8i Ventures Sells Part of M2P Fintech Stake at 36x+ Return

Early-stage venture capital firm 8i Ventures said Monday (June 13) that it had sold part of its seed stake in Banking as a Service (BaaS) FinTech M2P Fintech, earning more than 36 times its original investment price in the process, according to The Economic Times.

8i Ventures has invested $1.8 million in M2P Fintech through its fund and investment partnerships with other entities, the fund reported. That includes about $250,000 during M2P’s $1 million seed round in 2020, of which it has sold $101,000 worth of shares at an exit value of $3.7 million.

Based in India, M2P Fintech provides application programming interface (API) infrastructure that helps businesses of any scale embed financial products. It raised $56 million in January in a fundraising round led by New York-based global private equity firm Insight Partners. It works with over 500 FinTechs, banks and other financial institutions (FIs).

“Looking at the growth prospects of M2P Fintech, we did not want to sell the shares,” Vikram Chachra, founding partner, 8i Ventures, told ET. “However, we decided to give back the capital to our investors so they can roll it back in our second fund (Fund II), which we will be closing this year. Most of our partners in Fund I are anchoring the Fund II.”

Related: M2P FinTech Raises $35M in Funding at $335M Valuation

In October, M2P FinTech generated $35 million in Series C investments to push its valuation to $335 million.

The startup, which began in November 2014, plans to use the fresh capital to bolster its API infrastructure capabilities and broaden its reach beyond its current market of India, Nepal, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Bahrain and Egypt. Future expansions are eyed for Indonesia, Bangladesh and Vietnam, as well as the Middle East and North Africa.

In 2019, Visa announced a collaboration with M2P to help FinTechs issue plastic and digital payments as part of the Visa FinTech Fast Track program, in which M2P collaborates with Visa to enable faster go-to-market for FinTechs interested in launching new payment solutions.

The program lets FinTechs connect with a single processor to easily introduce new payments products across a dozen Asian-Pacific markets.

Since M2P launched, its API-powered products have been used by more than 200 tech companies, including Swiggy, Bharat pe and Razorpay.