B2B Payments Startup yBANQ Acquired By India’s Clear

yBANQ, the corporate payments startup, has been purchased by Clear, which was known as Cleartax in the past, The Economic Times reported Wednesday (July 7).

“We have been till now helping enterprises automate their GST compliances and electronic invoices. [This acquisition is] a logical next step for us to provide enterprise payment collection infrastructure for our clients and offer pay out facilities as well,” Clear Founder and CEO Archit Gupta said, as per The Economic Times.

yBANQ provides digitized bookkeeping, reconciliation and payments collection offerings to companies. In 2019, the startup landed approximately $1.5 million in a seed round.

Its workforce consists of 14 people that were connected with FinTech upstarts such as PayU and Citrus Payments in the past.

“The yBANQ acquisition is primarily for its team and intellectual property,” Gupta said, as per The Economic Times.

“We are a bunch of FinTech enthusiasts who love to solve for India. We are a Y-combinator backed startup,” yBANQ, which is based in India, said on its website.

In separate news, online payment and banking tech firm Cashfree recently indicated that it had landed an investment from the State Bank of India.

The move “reinforces their shared vision of promoting digital modes of payments,” according to a June news release from Cashfree.

With a customer base of over 100,000 companies in India and globally, Cashfree offers what it refers to as a “full-stack payments solutions platform” that enables customers to obtain and send electronic payments in one integration.

Separately, Tide, the British financial technology firm that works with small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), is set to step into the Indian market.

“[SMBs are] a crucial segment for economic growth but it is also quite underserved in India. Our aim is to bring services on one platform and ensure working capital liquidity for [SMBs],” Tide India CEO Gurjodhpal Singh said, as per a published report in June.