Mobile Point of Sales (PoS) payment company Mswipe has raised an undisclosed amount in Series B funding from existing investors Matrix Partners and Axis Bank, reports TechCircle citing sources with direct knowledge on the matter. Mswipe’s MD and CEO Manish Patel has declined to comment on this to the publication.
Medianama had also heard the same from sources but we had been unable to confirm it. We tried contacting Matrix Partners and Mswipe on this but we’re yet to hear back from them. We’ll update in case we hear back.
Mswipe had earlier raised an undisclosed amount of investment from Matrix Partners last January, although the report says Axis Bank had also participated in this round. Note that Axis had partnered MSwipe and Hitachi’s Prizm Payments to launch a mobile point of sales solution in July 2012. Prizm Payments MD Loney Antony had also informed MediaNama that the company has the distributorship for Mswipe’s device.
Before this, Mswipe had reportedly received angel investment from former Anand Rathi investment banking head and Mumbai Angels co-founder Praveen Chakravarty and Beacon India Private Equity Fund founder and managing director Deepak Shahdadpuri in 2012.
Setup in March 2011 by Manish Patel, Mswipe currently offers a series of point of sale devices like card swipers which plugs into the mobile phone’s audio jack to enable POS payments, WisePads which pairs with the user’s phone or tablet to convert it into a POS and a dedicated Android phone which runs on Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’. It also offers apps for Java, Android and iOS devices.
It claimed to have POS terminal deployments with 4,000 merchants in over 200 cities and towns across the country, as of January 2013. This includes McDonalds, MakeMyTrip, Idea Cellular, Asian Paints, Reliance Life Insurance, Max Bupa, Cinemax, Carzonrent and others.
Competition
Other players in this space include AngelPrime’s Ezetap and One97 Communications-backed Mobiswipe Technologies. CDMA based telco MTS had launched its own mobile point of sale device called MTS mPOS which could be attached to MTS mobiles for mobile transactions while payments solutions provider Oxigen had launched OxiShaan, a Mini ATM device which also acts as a mobile point of sale (PoS) terminal.
iKaaz had also introduced an NFC sticker based mPOS Solution in April 2013 while Mahindra Comviva had launched its mPOS solution payPLUS in June 2013. Yes Bank had also launched mobile point of sale (mPOS) in December 2012 while mobile payments company Paymate had launched PayPOS mobile application which enabled credit and debit cards payments and electronic transactions on mobile phones at the point of sale.
