Online payment collection platform Instamojo has raised an undisclosed amount of investment in a Series A round of funding from Kalaari Capital and existing investors like Blume Ventures, 500Startups and others. Kalaari Capital Managing Director Vani Kola will be joining the company board as part of the deal.
Prior to this, Instamojo had raised around $500,000 from 500 Startups, Blume Ventures and angel investors like Rajan Anandan, Sunil Kalra, Dave McClure, Rob de Heus, Thijs Gitmans, Pankaj Jain, Shailesh Rao, Bharathram Thothadri, and Avlesh Singh among others.
Instamojo plans to use the funds for product development, marketing and expanding the current team across all functional areas. A part of this investment will also be used to set up a new office in Bangalore. The company mentions that it will soon launch a ‘Referral program’ for both buyers and sellers, enabling them to earn credit by referring friends to the platform.
Instamojo initially offered payment collection service focused on digital goods and services only. In June this year, it introduced a new option for sellers to sell and collect payments for physical goods. With this feature, sellers could create storefronts of their physical goods and sell products to their customers.
In September this year, Instamojo also launched an app store that provides users with a suite of apps to simplify online selling and collection of payments. Users need to subscribe to these apps, some of which are free and others paid, in order to use them. Some of the available apps on the platform included Email multiple customers, Merchant affiliate system, iMojo link privacy system and SMS notification alerts among others.
Recent developments from Instamojo
– Earlier this month, Instamojo also released Instamojo payments button that sellers can integrate to their website.
– In February, Instamojo had introduced a Social Pay feature that allowed consumers to purchase products for free by either sending a tweet or posting an update on their Facebook profile. Instamojo had claimed that it registered 10,000 unique Social Pay transactions till then (53% of transactions happened through Facebook, 46% through Twitter and 1% through LinkedIn).
– Last year, in October the company had introduced a feature called Instamping, which added customer information on PDF files at the time of sale in order to discourage piracy.
