India’s Razorpay has purchased offline payments firm Ezetap, marking the Sequoia Capital-backed firm’s latest bet on the payments industry.
Razorpay, which is valued at more than $7 billion and offers payment gateway services for online merchants, said in a statement that the acquisition was its biggest to date. Media reports said the deal value is around $150-200 million.
Razorpay said the deal would boost efforts to tap the offline market which still accounts for a bulk of electronic payments in India. Ezetap, whose products include point-of-sale machines, processes more than $10 billion in annual transactions in India.
“There is still a large portion of offline payments and in-person payments that we don’t cover,” Razorpay co-founder Shashank Kumar said.
Ezetap will continue to operate independently after its acquisition.
The deal will also help Razorpay cross-sell its services, including loan offerings, to offline businesses, Kumar said in an interview, adding that Razorpay currently serves more than 8 million businesses and processed payments worth $80 billion since its inception about eight years ago.
India’s Pine Labs, which for years focussed only on offline payments, last year started processing online transactions. Pine Labs is targeting $4-5 billion in monthly online transactions within two years, Reuters reported.
