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With an aim to address the scaling challenges of early-stage fintech startups, Tamil Nadu-based M2P has invested in Future Group-backed payment gateway provider LivQuick

M2P, also known as YAP, has enabled 200+ businesses including Ola, CRED and Open, among others to embed financial products

The Indian prepaid cards market alone is expected to grow by over 35% CAGR from 2021 to 2026 and reach $340 Bn by 2026

Tamil Nadu-based M2P Fintech that provides banking and payments application programming interface (API) infrastructure to financial companies, has announced a $4 Mn investment in Future Group-backed payments startup LivQuik Technology.

Founded in 2012 by Mohit Lalvani and Yudhajit Nag Sen, LivQuik is a Reserve Bank of India (RBI)-approved prepaid payment instrument issuer and a full-fledged money changer (FFMC). It provides prepaid products such as mobile wallets, virtual, physical contactless & EMV chip cards, and multiple types of prepaid instruments like a gift, meal, fleet and/or expense management.

M2P Fintech said it aims to address the needs of early-stage fintech startups with this investment. Madhusudanan R, cofounder, M2P Fintech, said that currently, banks serve the requirements of large enterprises, consumer internet companies and established use cases.

The “strategic” investment will add LivQuik to its portfolio, enabling it to cater to the early-stage fintech, which has not been served adequately, partly due to high governance costs and uncertainty around business model or scalability.

LivQuik is backed by Kishore-Biyani led Future Group who invested in LivQuik for a 55% stake. The startup claims to have re-architected Future Pay, the flagship loyalty and payments app of Future Group, to a microservices architecture to enable super scale and support millions of users with 100K+ transactions per day.

Besides, the startup has raised two seed rounds of $1.6 Mn and $500K each, from Snow Leopard technology ventures.

As digital payments continue to pick up pace in India, Niti Aayog, in its report titled ‘Digital Payments – Trends, Issues and Opportunities,’ forecast the online payment industry to grow to $1 Tn by 2023.

Further, the Indian prepaid cards market alone is expected to grow by over 35% CAGR from 2021 to 2026 and reach $340 Bn by 2026. In a statement, M2P added that the investment in prepaid card provider LivQuik will allow it to serve fintech startups that aim to enter the market faster with new and innovative products.

Founded in 2014 by Madhusudanan R and Prabhu R, M2P Fintech, also known as YAP, is an API infrastructure company. Currently, it enables 200+ businesses to embed financial products in their customer journeys in partnership with banks, and other institutions.

The startup supports rewards and instruments such as issuing gift cards, physical or virtual prepaid cards that its clients can customise for their user base. It also offers QR code solutions to payment companies.

M2P last raised a series B round of $10 Mn led by Flourish Ventures and Omidyar Network. The startup has raised $15 Mn to date across funding rounds and counts BEENEXT, Better Capital and HNIs such as BharatPe’s Ashneer Grover, Indifi’s Alok Mittal, Pine Lab’s Amrish Rau and CRED’s Kunal Shah, among others.