BharatPe Notches $15.5M In Funding; Eika Group Teams With EedenBull

Welcome to The Axis, your late look at payments news from around the world. Coverage includes the $5 million Series A raise of Nigerian digital payments company Kudi. Norwegian banking alliance Eika Group is teaming up with EedenBull, India’s FinTech startup BharatPe notched $15.5 million in funding and consumers are putting digital assets in their wills in China.

Nigerian digital payments company Kudi has notched $5 million in a Partech-led Series A funding round, according to reports. YC and Khosla Ventures, existing investors, were also participants. The company plans to bolster its team as well as keep growing its agent network with the funding. Kudi Co-Founder and CEO Yinka Adewale said the company will be “hiring engineers, product managers and product designers,” according to the reports. And, to roll out new financial products, the company aims to team up with commercial banks as well as other financial services players. With the latest round, the company’s total investment has arrived at $6.7 million.

Eika Group, a Norwegian banking alliance, is teaming up with EedenBull for a partnership to create payment programs, EedenBull said in an announcement. The tie-up, in one case, will involve the delivery of a custom version of EedenBull’s Q Business® to the banks of Eika and their clients. EedenBull CEO and Founder Nicki Bull Bisgaard said in the announcement, “Eika is the perfect partner for EedenBull. With a customer-centric and conscious approach to innovation and new solutions, and a network that covers all of Norway, it gives us a good platform to distribute innovative payment solutions in the market.”

And FinTech startup BharatPe, which provides interoperable UPI quick-response (QR) codes to merchants, has notched $15.5 million in Series A funding, The Hindu BusinessLine reported. The company has brought its operations to 11 cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, among others. Insight Partners joined Beenext and Sequoia, which are existing investors in the firm, in the round. BharatPe CEO and Co-Founder Ashneer Grover said, according to the report, “We are ecstatic and thankful to partner with Insight Partners and become their first investment in an India-centered business.” The company was founded by Grover and Shashvat Nakrani in 2018.

In China, consumers are putting digital assets in their wills and are evolving into important portions of estates, Xinhua reported. A 29-year-old office worker in Beijing, for instance, was worried about deposits on platforms such as Alipay and WeChat pay. The worker, however, then listed them in her will. “More and more young people are managing their money online rather than saving in banks,” the worker told the outlet. Even so, the average age of testators in 2018 was 71.26 years old compared to 77.43 years old in 2013.