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Start-ups looking to expand the reach of financial services continue to receive investor approval. Zeta, a fintech company that manages a complete neo-bank platform and offers payment solutions for businesses, announced today that its valuation reached $ 300 million thanks to its first external financing.
Sodexo BRS financed Zeta's C Series in order to take a minority stake in the company. Zeta's executives declined to reveal the scale of the funding, but a person familiar with the case told TechCrunch that the amount was less than $ 60 million.
It's the first time that Zeta – or his CEO and co-founder, Bhavin Turakhia – is raising money from an outside party, he told TechCrunch in an interview.
Turakhia, 39, co-founded a number of web companies over the years for which he sold for $ 160 million in 2014, as well as the team collaboration and productivity application, Flock. Flock has also not mobilized external capital so far.
Zeta operates in Asia and Latin America and has companies and banks seeking to offer fintech products to individuals and businesses as potential customers. Its full cloud neo-banking platform supports the issuance of credit, debit and prepaid products. Its enterprise solutions support TnE cards, purchase cards, expense management, payroll disbursements and corporate donations.
The company already has more than 2 million users, three different banks and financial institutions, including Sodexo, which uses the Zeta platform, and more than 14,000 corporate customers, including Amazon. . Many Indian banks use Zeta's corporate donation service.
This new capital will be used to grow the company's operations in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and Southeast Asia. Turakhia and Ramki Gaddipati, chief technology officer and co-founder of the startup, told TechCrunch in an interview. It has already signed contracts with many partners to facilitate its expansion over the next six months.
The company, which currently employs around 450 people, is also planning to expand its team and establish itself in many other locations around the world.
"There have not been many innovations in the banking ecosystem over the last 20 years," Turakhia said. "If you look at the banking space, it is dominated by licensed software from traditional organizations. Many of these companies still provide most of the systems that handle most payment systems around the world for banks and non-banks. "
So, like a growing number of companies, Zeta is betting that it is time to disrupt the situation. "This is the genesis of the launch of Zeta, which allows the creation of new innovative technologies that offer interesting use cases to banks and other financial institutions wishing to issue credit, debit or prepaid products and offering their customers improved features, "he said. I said.
And it was this opportunity that led Turakhia to seek external capital, he said. "In the next five to seven years, I want to make Zeta 20 to 30 times larger than any outing I've had," he said.
In addition, Zeta also felt that Sodexo, which operates around the world, could add value to its platform.
Aurelien Sonet, CEO of BRS at Sodexo, said in a statement: "Sodexo has been a strategic partner of Zeta since 2017. This investment will allow Sodexo Group to benefit from Zeta's full suite of solutions and offer an experience transparent payment to its customers. consumers. Zeta and Sodexo are already working together to roll out the Zeta platform in several Sodexo subsidiaries in different regions. "
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