Payments firm Juspay raises $60 mn days after open-sourcing routing layer

Payments infrastructure firm Juspay has secured $60 million as part of its Series D funding round through a combination of primary and secondary investments.

The latest round was led by Kedaara Capital, with participation from existing investors including SoftBank and Accel. Avendus Capital acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Juspay for the transaction.

The Bengaluru-based company, which operates as a technology service provider (TSP), plans to strengthen its artificial intelligence capabilities. It has expanded its footprint across Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America.

“Today, as we expand our global footprint and push the boundaries of AI, we remain committed to building truly open-source and interoperable payment systems that embrace the growing diversity in the payments landscape,” said Sheetal Lalwani, co-founder and chief operating officer, Juspay.

The company had raised $60 million in its Series C round in 2021 and $21.6 million in its Series B round in 2020, according to data from market intelligence platform Tracxn.

Juspay was reportedly in talks to raise $150 million in Series D earlier this year.

The fundraise comes days after the company open-sourced its payments orchestration platform. This followed moves by major payment aggregators, including PhonePe, Razorpay, Cashfree Payments, and Paytm, to ask their merchant partners to discontinue use of third-party routers such as Juspay.

The push by payment aggregators reflects an industry-wide trend of companies seeking exclusive and deeper relationships with merchants in a market characterised by thin margins.

Operational issues with Juspay’s orchestration layer had strained relationships between aggregators and their clients, prompting aggregators to urge merchants to avoid third-party routing altogether, Business Standard reported last week.

Juspay was authorised to operate as an online payment aggregator by the Reserve Bank of India in 2024, raising concerns that its routing software might favour its own offering.

The company has denied the allegations, stating that its payment routing layer is open-sourced and merchants have visibility into how transactions are routed to their partner payment aggregators.