Razorpay acquires Curlec at $20 mn valuation

Razorpay has acquired Curlec in its first international purchase, kicking off its global expansion plans just over a month after bagging its largest-ever funding of $375 million.

 

Razorpay Co-Founder and CEO Harshil Mathur said in an address to the media that the company has acquired a majority stake in Curlec at a valuation of $20 million and the balance stake acquisition will be completed in the next year and a half.

 

Kuala Lumpur-based fintech Curlec was founded in 2017 by Zac Liew and Steve Kucia and like Razorpay is a business-to-business payment solution provider. The company offers recurring and subscription-based payment collection for businesses, besides billing, payouts and other payments solutions.

 

"While we are building in India, we are keeping an eye on the Southeast Asian market. There is a lot happening in countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam. The size of the South East Asian market is $170 billion and we expect it to scale up to more than $1 trillion by 2023," Mathur said.

 

During its previous funding announcements, Razorpay had said that it plans to launch in two markets in the first half of 2022. Valued at $7.5 billion post its Series F round in December 2021, it is the second most valued fintech in India after Paytm, which recently went public. The startup’s valuation grew by 7x from $1 billion in just one year.

 

Mathur said that Razorpay will make further investments to scale up Curlec's presence. He said, "Curlec has seen 5 x growths in annual revenues since 2018. The e-commerce ecosystem in Malaysia is valued at about $21 billion and is expected to scale to $35 billion by 2025. With Curlec's founding team becoming a part of Razorpay, we will have a local team that understands the Malaysian and the Southeast Asian market at large."

 

Zac Liew, co-founder and CEO of Curlec, said, “We are incredibly excited to be combining forces with Harshil, Shashank and the Razorpay team. We’ve long admired what they’ve built in India from afar and are fully aligned with a common vision of building payment and banking solutions from top to bottom, for any business.”