Fintech startup Volopay raises $2.1M in seed round

3AI January 26, 2021

Singapore-based fintech startup Volopay has raised $2.1 million in seed funding to provide businesses and startups in the Asia Pacific region a powerful control center for all their financial needs.

Singapore-based fintech startup Volopay has raised $2.1 million in seed funding. The company said it wants to use the funding to provide businesses and startups in the Asia Pacific region a powerful control centre for all their financial needs.

The latest funding round was led by Tinder founder Justin Mateen. The round also saw participation from Soma Capital, CP Ventures, Y Combinator, VentureSouq, the founders of Razorpay – Shashank Kumar and Harshil Mathur, and other prominent angel investors.

The company said new funds will be used for hiring, product development, international expansion, and strategic partnerships.

Founded in 2019 by Rajith Shaji and Rajesh Raikwar, Volopay was started out of a personal experience. The co-founders were working at a leading financial services comparison platform based in Singapore, and realised it was challenging to track different company spending like subscriptions, vendor payments, and employee reimbursements. Rajith said, “I realised employee expenses and shared bank cards was a huge problem for businesses of all sizes, especially startups. The lack of visibility meant they were losing money due to unaccounted expenses. Volopay sets out to re-imagine business banking for startups and tech companies while providing significant cash-back and saving.”

The team said more than 100 companies have started using the product in Singapore and these include Smart Karma, Dathena, Medline, Sensorflow, and Beam. The company stated the COVID-19 environment has accelerated the need for SMEs to digitise their operations so they are better able to scale and serve their customers in interactions which are now often done remotely or digitally.

Jimmy Lee, Director of Finance at mobility startup Beam, said: “Volopay is the expense management tool to look out for. They’ve innovated quickly in the past few months to build products that helped us to reduce time, effort, and cost in expense management and giving us generous cashback on card spending”.

The startup has also integrated with fintech giant Airwallex’s API suite. “We are excited to be Volopay’s chosen API partner at such a significant stage of the company’s growth. Airwallex’s purpose is to empower businesses like Volopay to grow without borders and as a result, contribute to the growth of the global economy,” said Dave Stein, Head Of Corporate Development at Airwallex.

The platform offers companies business accounts, corporate cards, money transfers, expense tracking, subscription management, and accounting all in one single platform. It also has a corporate card for startups.

In a statement, Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alstromer said: “Helping companies with tools that make it easier to do business and get their expenses under control is a huge opportunity globally, especially in the post-COVID world. Volopay has already shown they are ready to create the financial control centre for businesses of all sizes that need to grow and scale. We have seen this already with Brex in the USA, and see that Volopay is on a similar trajectory to empower businesses across the Asia Pacific.”

Volopay currently operates in Singapore and said it plans to expand across the Asia-Pacific region over the next three years. The startup will be launching operations in Australia in late January 2021.

Picture from freepik.com

A Greener Future with AI: Minimizing Carbon Footprint for Sustainable Innovation

Featured Article Author: Jemima Joy, ProV International Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed industries and opened doors to remarkable advancements, from generative art to complex decision-making systems. However, AI’s rapid growth comes with an often-overlooked environmental cost—its carbon footprint. As the demand for AI-powered tools grows, so does the energy consumption required to develop, train, and […]

The COO Agenda: Creating an Actionable Plan for Strategic Growth

Featured Article Author: Sidhartha Shishoo, COO, SG Analytics The Chief Operating Officer (COO) is responsible for orchestrating and optimizing the fundamental operations of the organization, bearing the sole mantle of ensuring operational excellence. This encompasses the seamless integration of operational technology, technical systems, management protocols, and organizational ethos with the overarching mission and strategy of […]

ADKAR – Driving Behavioural Change for Smoother AI Adoption

Featured Article: Author: Abhishek Tandon, LTIMindtree As mentioned in chapter 1, AI projects generally suffer from abandonment because they are left at the point of execution and not thought through from a consumption perspective. One of the key reasons for that is lack of understanding of the “bigger picture” that ends up causing a lot […]

Rethinking Reasoning in AI with Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Featured Article by Rahul Pandey, Data Science & Applied AI Practice Leader, C5i Beyond Understanding to Reasoning As AI systems evolve, the true benchmark is no longer their ability to comprehend it, it’s their ability to reason. Today, we stand at the edge of a significant breakthrough: Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Prompting (MCoT), a technique that allows […]

India's largest platform and marketplace for GCC & AI leaders and professionals

3AI Digital Library