Indian payments unicorn Razorpay has acquired a majority stake in Curlec, a Malaysian recurring payments solutions provider. The cost was just under $20 million.
Curlec is the first international acquisition for Razorpay, and taken together with the previous ones it shows a very deliberate growth strategy. In 2018 the company acquired Thirdwatch, an AI-based fraud analytics platform. The following year they grabbed Opfin, a provider of payroll and human resources management solutions. In 2021 Razorpay landed TERA Finlabs, another AI-influenced platform. It provides SaaS risk technology.
Razorpay serves online businesses by providing easily integrated APIs that allow them to give and receive payments, operate current accounts and use working capital loans. It has more than eight million B2B customers including Facebook and Zomato, and is expected to surpass $90 billion in total payment volume by the end of this year.
“We look forward to the next phase of our journey and scaling together across Malaysia and Southeast Asia,” Curlec co-founder and CEO Zac Liew said.
“With Curlec coming onboard, we at Razorpay are really excited as we mark our first step towards expanding in the South East Asia region,” said Harshil Mathur, CEO and co-founder of Razorpay. ”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. The team and values of Curlec mirrors that of ours in every sense.”
Razorpay is now valued at $7.5 billion following a late 2021 $375 million Series F infusion led by Lone Pine Capital, Alkeon Capital and TCV. They joined existing investors Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital India, GIC and Y Combinator. The new financing more than doubled their valuation from the $3 billion it was priced at before the Series F round that was announced Dec. 19.