New Delhi: Airpay Payment Services Pvt. Ltd, a start-up that runs omni-channel payments platform Airpay, has raised series A funding of Rs24 crore led by venture capital firm Kalaari Capital, with participation from existing investors Rakesh Jhunjhunwala and Rajesh Jhunjhunwala.

Airpay is a payments platform through which enterprises can make and receive payments across channels including desktop, mobile and offline. It allows clients to receive (from customers) and send (to vendors) payments over multiple platforms and through popular financial instruments such as credit and debit cards, online banking and mobile wallets.

Airpay Chief Executive Amit Kapoor said the company plans to invest the new capital in technology development and building a larger sales and distribution team to increase clients, which include companies in hospitality, education, banking and retail.

“Our differentiation is that we provide an integrated payments solution to large enterprises. There are few payment companies that focus on large enterprises and that gives us an edge. Plus, we provide a one-stop payments solution across channels that makes it very convenient for enterprises,” Kapoor said.

India’s digital payments will jump by 10 times to touch $500 billion by 2020, according to a July 2016 study by Google (Alphabet Inc.) and Boston Consulting Group. The report said that consumer-to-merchant transactions will be the biggest growth driver of digital payments, followed by business-to-business and then consumer-to-consumer transactions. The government has been aggressively promoting cashless modes of payment over the past one year. It introduced a unified payments interface in August, followed by the demonetization of high-value bank notes in November.

“It is heartening to note that Airpay has scaled its (payments processing number) 14 times over the last year,” Rakesh Jhunjhunwala said.

Mumbai-based Airpay, which is offered as a Saas (software-as-a-service) product, was founded by 2012 by Amit Kapoor, Kunal Jhunjhunwala and Rohan Deshpande, who all worked together at online music provider Hungama.

Airpay said its solutions reduce the average time taken for payments reconciliation and collection. Additionally, clients are given the capability to run promotional campaigns simultaneously across different platforms. Some of the features of Airpay’s platform include: segment-wise transactions reporting, single window transaction settlement, loyalty-management programmes and single process for online and offline transactions.

Source: livemint