Razorpay, a prominent fintech company, announced its first international expansion on Tuesday with the acquisition of a majority of shares in Curlec, a leading Malaysian fintech business, for an undisclosed sum. Malaysia’s e-commerce sector is rising, with a projected market size of $21 billion in 2021 and a forecasted market size of over $35 billion by 2025.
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With the acquisition of Curlec, Razorpay stated it will open up new channels for global business expansion for online enterprises operating in India and Malaysia.
“With the vast experience in a heterogenous market like India over the last seven years, our expansion to the Southeast Asia payments market is timed exactly to coincide with the company’s growing dominance in all things payments,” said Harshil Mathur, CEO and Co-Founder, Razorpay.
Zac Liew and Steve Kucia established Curlec in 2018. The firm develops cutting-edge technology on top of existing payment infrastructure to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to collect recurring payments and manage their cash flow.
Since 2018, the company’s annual revenue has increased by roughly 5X, thanks to funding from 500 worldwide and other investors. Razorpay has made four acquisitions in all, although this is it’s first in the global market.
“We look forward to the next phase of our journey and scaling together across Malaysia and Southeast Asia,” said Liew.
TERA Finlabs (AI-based risk tech SaaS Platform) in 2021, Opfin (Payroll & HR management solution) in 2019 and Thirdwatch (Fraud Analytics AI-platform) in 2018 were the company’s previous acquisitions.
Razorpay Funds
As of December 2021, Razorpay served over eight million businesses, including Facebook, Ola, Zomato, Swiggy, and Cred, and had a total payment volume (TPV) of $60 billion.
The company said that the capital raised will go toward Razorpay’s objective of making finance frictionless by establishing a full-stack financial solutions business that can handle all of a company’s payment and banking needs on one platform.
Harshil Mathur, CEO and Co-founder of Razorpay stated, “We believe we will radically change how payments and banking is done in nearly every sector of India. While these freshly infused funds will be used in multiple areas, the most important one will be towards investing in building intelligent technologies that will make the lives of small businesses easier by providing them a fundamentally different experience and reducing complexity.
