South Korean firm leads funding firm Cashfree

Bengaluru-based payment gateway start-up Cashfree has raised $5.5 million (Rs 38 crore at current exchange rates) in its Series A funding round led by South Korean venture capital firm Smilegate Investment, a company statement said. Existing investor Y Combinator, a California-based start-up accelerator, also participated in the round. George Osborne, former British finance minister, and Vellayan Subbiah, former managing director of non-banking finance company Cholamandalam Investment also put in money, the statement added. The company will use the capital to expand its team and to distribute its API banking platform, the statement said. Cashfree's application programming interface banking platform lets businesses send money round-the-clock and instantly to bank accounts using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and credit and debit cards. This prevents companies from uploading complicated files on their corporate banking portals. Akash Sinha, co-founder and CEO, Cashfree, said: “We have been growing 25 per cent every month for the last 12 months. Our API banking platform connects any organisation's software product or enterprise resource planning to the banking system for automated transactions.” Cashfree had raised capital from Y Combinator and other investors in 2017. It was incubated at digital payments firm PayPal.