India VC Funds Flow Into B2B (FinTech) Space

The deals seem to be getting bigger headed into the last few weeks of the year.

In the latest FinTech funding activity in India, Udaan, which focuses on B2B eCommerce, raised the equivalent of $585 million from a series of investors. Udaan will use the funds to connect small businesses through its online marketplace, according to reports, which spans verticals such as electronics and toys to food items. The company’s marketplace brings together more than 3 million retailers and 25,000 sellers across 900 cities and towns across the country.

The Series D round came through a range of investors including Tencent, Altimeter, Footpath Vnetures, Citi Ventures and others, including existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners.

TechCrunch noted that the new investment round represents the largest for a B2B eCommerce platform in India, and values the startup between $2.3 billion to $2.7 billion.

The Udaan deal takes its spot as the biggest one to date in India, outpacing the roughly $440 million raised by Flipkart earlier in the year and Delhivery in March.

Of course those figures would be dwarfed by the $2 billion rumored this week to be coming to Paytm, the online financial services giants, and which would value that company at $16 billion. The funding round, as Bloomberg reported, would come from Ant Financial, SoftBank and Discovery Capital Management.

The latest spate of deals brings total investment year to date to a bit more than $4.2 billion.

UGRO Capital

Separately, but also with a focus on smaller firms, UGRO Capital, which lends to smaller companies, raised the equivalent of about $10.5 million from investors including Flipkart’s Sachin Bansal and Poonawalla Finance Pvt. Ltd., which operates as part of the Cyrus Poonawalla Group.

The company has said that it would, as reported by vccircle.com, bring in a “steady pool” of fee income and continue its strategy that focuses on balance sheet lending, off balance sheet activity and partnerships with financial institutions. The firm provides loans to smaller companies in sectors spanning health care and various component providers.

“We want to establish our ability to raise different forms of liability from diverse sources,” said Shachindra Nath, executive chairman at UGRO Capital, according to the report.

Clix Capital

At the tail end of last month, Clix Capital said it raised the equivalent of $40 million in financing that was led by its largest stakeholder AION Capital, according to the Economic Times. Management has said the funding for the small to medium-size business (SMB) lending platform will also move into consumer lending.

Fyle

TechCrunch reported earlier in the month that Fyle, which focuses on expense management, received $4.5 million to broaden its reach overseas. The company’s platform helps a firm’s employees report business expenses, and can extract data from emails. The recent funding round was led by a hedge fund based in the U.S., Steadview Capital. Other investors included Tiger6 Global, Pravega Ventures and Freshworks. The $4.5 million represents an extension of a funding round seen earlier in the year, a series A that now comes in at $8.7 million.