E-commerce firm ItzCash Card has completed its second round of funding, two years after it raised $ 10 million from Matrix Partners and Intel Capital. This time, it raised Rs. 500 million, with LightSpeed Venture Partners joining the two existing private equity investors. The funds will be used to add new products, scale up its business and enter a new market segment - retail payments. The Company ItzCash has acquired over 6 million users in five years and offers four pre-paid cards that can be used to purchase tickets, book a hotel room, pay for insurance, settle bills etc off 5000 merchants in 1800 towns and cities. It has set up 180,000 directly owned outlets called ItzCash Point and 20,000 ItzCash franchisees called ItzCash World. It has an annual turnover of Rs. 1700 crore. ItzCash is the second most popular mode of transactions (after ICICI) on rail booking site IRCTC, its MD Naveen Surya informed, in an interview with Medianama last year. Itz also offers online payment of propoerty tax for the municipal corporations of Mumbai and Delhi. Itz's parent is the Essel Group, which also runs the daily DNA, DTH business Dish TV and the Zee Network. Competitors DoneCard and Oxigen are its primary competitors. Oxigen, which recently tied up with Reliance's DTH venture Big TV to offer payment solutions, serves 12 million customers. It has 75,000 outlets pan-India and is also expanding aggressively and diversifying into services, such as Itztravel, ItzInsurancemall and ItzPhoto. Oxigen's promoters are Microsoft (which…
