Tata Capital Growth Fund LP leads series B investment in Nearex

Tata Capital Growth Fund LP led the Series B equity investment in Nearex, a Singapore technology startup that’s rapidly emerging as a category leader in the mobile micropayment domain. The existing investors in Nearex, BEENOS Asia and Xinvesco also participated in the Series B Investment.

Nearex is very well poised to lead the multi-trillion dollar cashless micropayment opportunity across emerging markets. The benefits of extensive financial inclusion through mobile wallets and agent networks spread across small towns and villages of Africa, Latin America and growing parts of Asia get eventually limited by the need for cash for daily small payments. All the costs and hassles associated with cash such as distribution, safe keeping, accounting and small change resurface at the point of payment for the consumer as well as the merchant.

Akhil Awasthi, Managing Partner, Tata Capital Growth Fund, said, “We believe that cashless payments will continue to grow rapidly across the developing world. In particular, mobile micropayments offers a large market opportunity. Nearex through its cutting edge technology platform is poised to become a global leader. We are delighted to partner with Nearex, a leading player in the mobile micropayments technology space led by Mayank Sharma. ”

Nearex was founded by mobile technology industry veterans Mayank Sharma and Arun Tanksali in 2012 with the vision to overcome this challenge of cashless micropayments that can only succeed when a technology competes favourably with the convenience and affordability of cash.

Speaking on this transaction, Mayank Sharma, Founder & CEO, Nearex remarked “When technology innovations get conceptualized in Asia, it is difficult to find investers as there are few who look beyond localization of established western investment trends. We are impressed by Tata Capital Growth Fund LP’s approach and are delighted to have them on board. We had few doubts about the demand for our solution as our customers have endorsed the product with multiple recent orders after sucessful pilots. But now with the backing of Tata Capital Growth Fund LP, they will feel further assured that Nearex can confidently scale with any demand.”

Nearex’s XIP solution does so by empowering merchants with XipPOS, a mobile point of sale device that costs much like a feature phone and consumers with XipTAG, a secured contactless card or a sticker. XIP system integrates easily with existing mobile wallet services and can be offered by mobile money service providers or other FIs to create a payment network at astonishingly low cost and healthy ROI expected from the vast payment volumes. The pilots and initial launches of the technology in Africa received very positive response on the convenience and ease of use offered by the XIP solution.

Teruhide Sato, Founder, BEENOS Asia, added, “We are so delighted to have Tata Capital Growth Fund LP in our team. BEENOS has believed in Nearex seeing the efforts and the innovations the team has achieved in Africa and Asia since their founding. We would like to keep supporting them with our business experience and network in Mobile/Ecommerce/Payment industry in Japan and other emerging countries in Asia.”