Payments platform Cashfree raises $120,000 to automate bank transfers

Payments platform Cashfree on Saturday announced receiving USD 120,000 in seed funding from Silicon Valley-based startup accelerator Y Combinator, in a move to automate bank transfers.

Addiitonally, the company is talking to investors to raise a larger round to scale its merchant acquisition and engineering teams.

Started in September 2015 by Akash Sinha and Reeju Datta, the startup was bootstrapped for two years, prior to being funded by Y Combinator.

It however, claims to be India's first payment gateway that automates inbound and outbound bank transfers. This replaces the slow, error-prone alternative of uploading Excel files for bulk payments or manually reconciling payments received via bank transfers.

Cashfree allows marketplaces and fintech platforms to easily setup custom payment flows while ensuring full regulatory compliance. The product is being used for automated payouts for crowd funding, marketplace vendor settlements, pay roll for on-demand economy workers, loan disbursal and repayment for lenders, modern ERP and accounting tools for invoice payments, and instant refunds via payment gateway, versus five to seven days presently.

"The products we have built are first of their kind and are helping businesses scale and innovate faster. We already are a profitable business and are looking to process 200 crores of monthly payments by the end of the year," said Akash Sinha.

"Payments innovation will play a major role in shaping the Indian economy. Cashfree has identified payment problems which existing payment companies haven't been solving," added CEO and partner Y Combinator, Michael Seibel.