While digitization has transformed banking for Indian consumers, corporate banking has been left in the slow lane. It still relies heavily on clunky infrastructure, paper trails, and spreadsheet-heavy workflows. TransBnk wants to address that gap. Bessemer Venture Partners has invested in the three-year-old startup in a $25 million round to accelerate its progress.
Over the past decade, India has experienced a significant boom in consumer fintech, driven by transformative shifts such as the rise of digital payments through the government-backed Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and the proliferation of payment aggregators. However, these innovations have done little to enhance the experience for businesses, especially in transaction banking. In this area, payments, collections, and account statements still rely on manual processes. Business customers often juggle multiple internet banking portals and depend on spreadsheets for reconciliation.
This gap persists despite India being the world’s largest small and medium enterprise (SME) market, with nearly 75 million SMEs. All of these businesses would benefit from more modern financial infrastructure.
The untapped potential in corporate banking represents a lucrative opportunity. India’s B2B fintech industry is projected to reach a market size of $20 billion by 2030, according to a February 2024 report. The country is already home to 26 fintech unicorns with a combined market value of $90 billion, per data analyzed last year. However, most of these startups have focused primarily on innovations in payments and lending rather than core banking infrastructure.
Mumbai-based TransBnk, co-founded by former bankers Vaibhav Tambe, Lavin Kotian, Pulak Jain, and Sachin Gupta, positions itself in this space with what it calls a “common operating system.” This is a single window through which businesses can access the entire banking ecosystem. It offers a foundational layer of microservices, enabling use cases such as treasury, liquidity, and escrow management to be built on top.
The founders, during their banking careers, frequently heard from customers asking for a single, consolidated platform for transaction banking. This inspired them to take on the challenge of consolidating and integrating with multiple banks to create a single platform accessible via web interface, mobile app, SDKs, or APIs.
Founded in 2022, the startup currently works with 60 banks, with 40 fully integrated into its platform to process transactions, payments, and reconciliation. It also has 220 customers. About 80% of these are merchants, including lenders, fintechs, and non-bank financial companies (NBFCs). The remaining 20% are banks that have white-labeled its software to provide corporate banking services to their customers.
Globally, companies like Finastra, Temenos, and Infosys’ Finacle help modernize banking through software platforms. In the U.S., players like Treasury Prime offer embedded banking solutions for enterprise customers. But in India, startups in this domain remain few and far between.
Building for this space requires deep expertise in banking infrastructure, including integration with legacy core banking systems and connecting them to enterprise stacks like ERPs and treasury platforms. It also requires close relationships with banks to access and build upon their data and workflows.
Over the past year, TransBnk says it has grown its revenue more than 12 times, reaching around $12 million in annual recurring revenue. The startup claims it turned profitable after taxes in February and maintains healthy gross margins of roughly 80%. The company states it enables around 110 million transactions monthly, covering 11,000 bank accounts and utilizing over 1,500 APIs.
The Series B funding round, which includes $4 million in secondary transactions, also saw participation from Fundamentum, Arkam Ventures, 8i Ventures, Accion, and Japan’s GMO Venture Partners. The startup plans to expand beyond India and enter markets such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East to continue building its infrastructure platform layer. It also intends to expand its reach to sectors including real estate, pharma, and renewable energy.
With the latest funding, TransBnk has raised around $26 million in total. Its valuation grew seven times from the last round, though specific figures were not provided.