Salesforce Ventures, the investment arm of the cloud-based sales CRM giant, has said that it has invested an undisclosed amount into the Indian payments company Razorpay as it makes its first investment into the payments space.
The payments industry has been witnessing some strong growth ever since the start of the pandemic and this has been mainly because people have been forced to stay indoors and thus have had to rely on digital payments even for basic daily needs. This has ensured that all purchases, whether offline or online, are paid for through digital platforms and this has increased the transaction volumes in payments manifold. With Razorpay being one of the largest digital payments companies in a place like India which has a huge population, this seems to fit the investment strategy of Salesforce very well.
Razorpay has been valued at $3 billion in recent times and it is expected that the company would be using the funds collected to improve the platform, add more features and also begin its expansion to other countries in South East Asia.
“I am certain that this investment, along with support from our existing investors will help build an ecosystem for hassle-free, easy-to-integrate payments and banking experience. We also hope to expand, build new products and deliver this experience to businesses in Southeast Asian countries too,”, said CEO and co-founder Harshil Mathur.
The company has said that over the last 6 months, it has witnessed a 40-50% growth in payment transaction volumes and the company has been processing payments worth $50 billion annually. It has also launched its neobank RazorpayX recently which it says has witnessed 400% growth in transaction volume and the company says that it would be looking to dominate the payments and banking services space in India in the coming months. It currently offers payment, lending, and banking solutions for merchants and businesses as well and with the industry growing strongly in recent times, it is expected that Razorpay would be able to ride the wave to improve on its volumes as well as expand to other regions as planned with the strong banking of Salesforce and other investors like Tiger Global.
