Open: The latest banking unicorn from India

Founded in 2017, Open names itself as Asia’s first neobanking platform for SMEs and startups. 

Powered by partner banks, Open offers a business account that let’s small business owners collect payments, auto-reconcile them, and make seamless payouts. It also offers additional tools designed exclusively for businesses, such as an integrated payment gateway, automated accounting and expense management.

The company currently serves more than 15,00,000 SMEs and processes US$24bn in transactions annually, plus according to Open, the platform onboards 50,000 new SMEs and startups every month. 

Entering the unicorn club 

Open has recently entered into India’s unicorn club with the announcement of its Series D funding round worth US$50mn at a valuation of US$1bn.

The company plans to use the latest funding amount to launch new services, expand its existing lending books, strengthen its leadership team and also double the workforce to 1,000 from 500 currently. The round was led by IIFL and also included existing investors such as Tiger Global, Temasek and 3one4 Capital.

“We are excited to partner with IIFL and existing investors Tiger Global, Temasek and 3one4 Capital for our Series D round. We see a lot of synergies with IIFL, especially on leveraging the lending book, as we are getting ready to launch innovative products like revenue-based financing, early settlement, working capital loan and business credit cards to SMEs on our platform,” said Anish Achuthan, co-founder & CEO, Open.

Automating finances for enterprises 

Founded by Anish Achuthan, Mabel Chacko and Ajeesh Achuthan, the Bengaluru-based firm currently works to automate business finances for small and medium enterprises and claims to power over 2.3 million SMEs – crossing over US$30bn in annualised transactions.

Open plans to launch Open Flo, a revenue-based financing model; Open Settl, to help in early settlement of dues; and Open Capital, for all working capital loan needs. This would be alongside taking its recently-launched services – Zwitch and BankingStack – globally, and hopes to reach over 5 million customers over the next one year.

Open raised its previous funding round, Series C, in October 2021 at half the current valuation. It soon went on to acquire consumer neo-banking platform Finin, in December 2021. The company claims to have raised over US$140mn in funding since its inception.