Nimbbl, an Indian startup seeking to improve conversions for merchants with its 1-click payment checkout solution, has raised $3.5 million in seed and pre-Series A rounds from Sequoia Capital India, Global Founders Capital (GFC), financial services platform Groww and a list of angel investors, the startup said Tuesday.
The Mumbai-headquartered startup offers a 1-click checkout solution with a list of payment methods including various Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) options and Indian government-backed Unified Payment Interface (UPI). Nimbbl personalizes the experience for customers by showing them payment methods relevant to them — instead of populating every solution on the face of the earth.
Former Citrus Pay and PayU executives Anurag Pandey and Amit Bansal founded Nimbbl in October 2020. The duo chanced upon the idea while working at Indian fintech startup Safexpay after leaving Citrus Pay and PayU, Pandey told TC in an interview.
“We felt that this problem needed to be solved from scratch, and we need to compress thinking on how to go about solving it,” Pandey said.
By personalizing the checkout experience for customers, the payment initiation rate on Nimbbl goes up by about 40%, which translates to a 6–8% increase in revenue for merchants, he said.
To be sure, several payment aggregators offer their proprietary checkout experiences that merchants can deploy. But those tend to not solve the payment initiation problem nor do they remove the friction faced by customers in narrowing down the relevant payment instruments, he said. In some cases, the checkout solutions offered by aggregators also have limited payment method options and not modern ones such as UPI and BNPL that digital-savvy customers often look for while completing their transactions.
Similarly, commerce platforms such as Shopify provide their 1-click checkout solutions in markets including the U.S., but those offerings are not available to their India customers.
Nimbbl’s solution can be integrated within a website, mobile app or a commerce platform such as Woo Commerce, Magento or Shopify.
Since its launch, Nimbbl has attracted over 4,000 merchants to use its checkout solution. It counts Indian airline Go First, audio device maker Skullcandy and cruise liner Cordelia Cruises among its clients.
So far, Nimbble has generated about $240 million of total payment volume in the financial year 2022-23 and clock between $970 million and $1.2 billion in 2023-24, with 20,000 merchants. The startup has a team of 37 people spread across Mumbai, New Delhi and Bengaluru.
According to the data presented by the Indian government in parliament last month, digital transactions in the country experienced a surge of almost 54%, soaring from $238 million in value in 2017-18 to $367 million in the financial year 2021-22. This growth is anticipated to persist given India’s ongoing digital transformation.
Nimbbl’s success in the last one-and-a-half-year of its debut has also helped it attract Palo Alto-based angel collective Amara VC and renowned Indian internet entrepreneurs and executives such as CRED founder Kunal Shah, Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau and Jupiter founder Jitendra Gupta to participate in the all-equity funding rounds.
Pandey said Nimbbl will deploy the funds to scale the system and invest in the sales side.
