Amazon and Flipkart’s biggest rival in ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ just raised $40 million

• The company will be hiring across the board, especially focusing on engineering, data science and AI roles.
• It has raised over $83 million to date and counts Valar Ventures as well as IA Ventures as investors.
• Simpl has disbursed more than 49 million loans in the ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ space, as per a Macquarie report.

Bengaluru-based fintech startup Simpl has raised $40 million in funding, the company’s founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Nitya Sharma told Business Insider.

The company — which offers buy now, pay later (BNPL) services — plans to use this capital to hire aggressively across the board, especially focusing on the engineering, data science and artificial intelligence (AI) departments. The company has a team of 150 and it plans to double the team size.

“We are growing very aggressively. So, we’ll be investing in the growth of the platform,” he added. The Series B funding round was led by Valar Ventures and IA Ventures with participation from LFH Ventures and other existing investors. With this, the company has raised over $83 million to date.

Simpl was founded in 2018 by Nitya Sharma and Chaitra Chidanand. The company enables merchants to offer simple payments solutions to their customers.


According to a report by Macquarie, published last month, Simpl has disbursed more than 49 million loans in the ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ space. It has recorded more transactions than Flipkart Pay Later, Amazon Pay Later and Paytm Postpaid.

The report also noted that it is among the biggest BNPL players in terms of active user base.

Company	Active User Base
Simpl	7 million
ZestMoney	6 million
Krazybee	2 million
LazyPay	2 million
Mobikwik	1 million

Source: Macquarie

Paytm may be among the largest players in the digital payments space with over 120 million users, but its user base is spread across unified payments interface (UPI), wallet payments, financial services, ecommerce, and more. The company aims to make money from its lending business.

“Since Paytm will largely be engaged in selling down these loans to partner banks or NBFCs (non-banking financial companies) balance sheets, the addressable fee pool is much lower,” said Macquarie.

A Redseer report added that the BNPL market is nascent in India, valued at $3-3.5 billion that could grow 15-fold over the next five years to $45-50 billion.

Simpl’s flagship product is the one-step “Pay Later” option, which allows customers to delay the payment of the product they have purchased for 15 days. The payments solution can be used to purchase food, apparels and more.

The company also allowed the users to make bill payments online. Its latest offering includes “Pay-in-3”, which allows customers to make the payment of their purchases in three equally payments every month.

It claims that their monthly active user base has grown nearly 10-fold in the last 18 months. It works with over 7,000 category leading online merchants such as Zomato, MakeMyTrip, BigBasket, Jio Platform, 1mg, Crocs and more.

"We built a fullstack checkout platform that gives merchants ultimate control of user experience and helps them build trust with consumers at checkout. Simpl is like a Khata (account) or a Tab for online commerce. This intuitive user experience, built on the bedrock of trust, will enable a larger ecommerce market and will lead to greater adoption of mobile payments in India and the rest of the world," Sharma added.

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