State Bank of India (SBI) has made an undisclosed investment in Bengaluru-based Cashfree. With this, the country's largest public-sector lender joins a slew of investors at the fintech startup's capital table, including Apis Partners, Smilegate, and Y Combinator. Cashfree raised $35 million in a Series B funding round led by Apis Growth Fund II and existing investor Y Combinator in November 2020, at a valuation of around $200 million.

“The company”s total funding since inception is USD 42 million. The total valuation of Cashfree is around USD 200 million,” says, Cashfree CEO and co-founder Akash Sinha.

Businesses such as Zomato, CRED, Nykaa, Delhivery, Acko, and Shell use the company's payments processing platform for e-commerce to vendor payments and marketplace settlements.

“We are excited about our partnership with the country’s trusted and leading lender SBI,” Akash Sinha, co-founder and chief executive officer at Cashfree, said in the statement. “The investment fits perfectly with our growth strategy as we continue to focus on customer experience and product innovation.”

Cashfree was founded in 2015 by Sinha and Reeju Datta to process online payments for Indian businesses. The company graduated from Y Combinator, a San Francisco-based startup incubator, in 2017.

The startup provides full-stack payments solution platform that enables over 1 lakh businesses in India and around the world to accept and disburse payments online through a single integration.

It competes with companies such as Razorpay, Billdesk, CCAvenue, and PayU—and specialises in payment settlement processing transactions via channels and instruments such as credit card, debit card, net banking, UPI, and popular wallets.

Cashfree claims to have made Rs 100 crore in revenue in 2020-21. It also claims to handle $20 billion in annual transactions.

Cashfree, which is currently ranked among the top payment service providers in India, processes USD 20 billion in transactions per year. Aside from India, Cashfree products are used in eight other countries, including the United States, Canada, and the United Arab Emirates.

“The investment from India”s largest bank shows its trust in Cashfree”s innovation and the way we are rapidly scaling up the payments business. This also underscores Cashfree”s role towards building a payments ecosystem that enables the fastest and easiest way to collect payments and make payouts for growing businesses,” Sinha said.

He added that the investment fits perfectly with its growth strategy as it continues to focus on customer experience and product innovation. At present Payouts is being used by over 5000 companies in India for vendor payouts by marketplaces; e-commerce refunds, wage payouts; loan disbursement; insurance claims processing; expense reimbursements and reward payouts. Cashfree also allows businesses to verify bank accounts during user onboarding as a part of their KYC process. Cashfree also allows businesses to verify bank accounts during user onboarding as a part of their KYC process.