Tazapay, a cross-border payments company, has raised $16.9m in its Series A funding round, which was led by Sequoia Capital Southeast Asia.
Other commitments came from EscapeVelocity, PayPal Alumni Fund and angel investor Gokul Rajaram, which all made their first investment into Tazapay. Existing backers of Tazapay, Foundamental, January Capital, RTP Global and Saison Capital, also participated in this round.
With the funds, the company hopes to scale its business across Asia and expand into other regions where there are rising demands for its platform. These regions include the Middle East and Europe.
As part of this expansion, Tazapay will seek payment licences in major markets that would grow its payment network.
The cross-border payments company is also enhancing its core capabilities and adding more local payment methods to better serve the growing list of verticals, including cross-border e-commerce, education technology, Software-as-a-Service and travel.
Tazapay, which is based in Singapore, is a digital payment platform that supports cross-border transactions. Its full-stack payment solution includes cards and local payment methods.
It stated that the advent of open banking and the maturing of real-time payments networks, such as the PayNow services in Singapore and Unified Payments Interface in India, has increased the customer demand for real-time payments.
Sequoia Capital Southeast Asia vice president Aakash Kapoor said, “Tazapay is building the payments and compliance infrastructure for cross-border commerce and services. This is a large space which is seeing another inflection point. Buyers increasingly prefer to use local real-time payments over traditional networks and businesses are keen to expand globally without going through the hassle of a local set-up.
“The Tazapay team has unique insights and experience to leverage this tailwind, and Sequoia Capital Southeast Asia is excited to partner with them as they double down on the opportunity.”
Through Tazapay, businesses can have access to a global network of over 170 markets for its card coverage and 85 markets for its local payments collection coverage through a single API integration. It hopes to expand the real-time local collection to over 100 by the end of the year.
Another Singaporean FinTech company to recently raise funds was Cenoa. The self-stylised borderless super wallet raised $7m for its seed round.
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