A $5 million pre-Series A round co-led by Capital 2B (an Info Edge fund) and IIFL Fintech Fund was raised by the international escrow banking platform Castler. Along with returning investors Zerodha, Venture Catalysts, 9Unicorns, and FAAD Network, Stride Ventures, and Piper Serica participated in the funding round as well.
Earlier in 2021, Zerodha, Venture Catalysts, 9Unicorns, FAAD Network, Lets Venture, and AngelList contributed $1.5 million to Castler’s pre-seed and seed round.
The additional funds will be used to increase the company’s domestic and international escrow product offerings, increase its banking partnerships to 25 banks, and expand its business tenfold over the following few years.
Vineet Singh and Dinesh Kumar co-founded the business in April 2021 with the goal of creating a global escrow platform for both domestic and international transactions based on sound governance and responsible execution. Recently, Castler hired ex-VP of Razorpay Kumar Amit as co-founder and COO in an effort to scale the company.
According to Castler, it makes trust an implicit component of all digital transactions and smart contracts while also streamlining and fully digitizing escrow banking for widespread adoption. In order to address issues with dynamic business and revenue models, complex transaction flows, sources of funding, identity verification, fraud management, and consumer protection, it has developed a proprietary banking stack.
According to Castler, which claims to work with 10 banking partners, over 500 businesses trust it as their go-to escrow solution, and it manages over Rs 5,000 crore in transactions each month.
