Volopay raises $29m in equity and debt for international expansion
Volopay, a Singapore-based corporate cards and payable management start-up, has raised $29 million in equity and debt.
Volopay team
The Series A funding round included participation from JAM Fund, Winklevoss Capital Management, Rapyd Ventures, Access Ventures, fintech veteran and angel investor Jeffrey Cruttenden – founder of Acorns, along with Accial Capital, Antler Global, and VentureSouq.
Justin Mateen, founder of Tinder and JAM Fund, who led the funding round into Volopay (and also was the original pre-seed and seed investor), describes the start-up’s team as “amazing” and commends its “ability to innovate quickly on the product side with a single stack scalable platform across multiple jurisdictions”.
The Y Combinator-backed firm is currently operating in Singapore and Australia, and is now plotting to expand across the APAC and MENA regions thanks to the new funding injection.
It will also invest further in new technologies to complement the existing product and enhance integrations with various ERP, HRM, and CRM software, and project management applications.
Volopay adds it is currently “hiring aggressively for key positions in each of its markets”.
“With APAC and MENA churning out several unicorn level enterprises every year, it is indeed making a big wave on the global frontier. And this is only the beginning. Accelerating their growth would require an efficient expense management tool that is simple yet scalable, something that Volopay has always aimed for,” say co-founders Rajith Shaji and Rajesh Raikwar.
Shaji continues: “Volopay is an ambitious project. To build an alternative to Volopay, you’d have to launch five different start-ups.
“We are building the control centre for modern companies for all their financial management needs. Our platform is as easy and seamless to use for a five-person company, as it is for a 500-person company.”
He adds that worldwide expansion is on the cards, too.
Volopay is “building the control centre for modern companies for all their financial management needs”
Volopay says it is “disrupting traditional business banking and aims to be adopted as the single and only solution growing, global businesses need for their cards, invoice automation, and bill payments along with the added bonus of a multi-currency business account without the hassle and limitations of a traditional bank”.
Its multi-currency wallets “will help completely eliminate exorbitant amounts of FX charges levied on international payments”, it emphasises.
To achieve this, Volopay is building its own infrastructure and applying for financial licences in its markets.
“Many of our competitors around the world will opt to integrate with third-party infrastructure suppliers to provide financial services. This limits the type of products you can offer clients, and with each region playing host to its own network providers, it is almost impossible to deliver a consistent and delightful customer experience for our global company clients operating in different parts of the world,” Shaji explains.
He claims that no other company has done this regionally.
Founded in 2020, Volopay now employs 150 people across Singapore, Australia, India, Indonesia and the Philippines. Among its clients are Funding Societies, Zipmex, Moneysmart, Smartkarma and Austrianova.
