Citrus Pay was launched in April 2011 by Jitendra Gupta to bridge the gap between the expectations of merchants, who desired analytics and automation, and the services provided by banks, which were limited to just a Visa or MasterCard checkout. The company bridges this gap by providing software that helps merchants manage their back-end software and payment gateways. It has three business verticals — payment processing, enterprise payment SaaS solutions and consumer payment services. Citrus Pay’s payment gateway is used by companies such as Indigo, Jet Airways, TinyOwl and Amazon India. The company introduced its wallet service Citrus Cash in February 2014 and it gained quite a bit of popularity before being shut down due to several instances of fraud. This service was reintroduced six months later with adequate safeguards to control misuse. Citrus Pay was the first wallet company to integrate its services with those of cab aggregators such as Olacabs and Meru Cabs to offer cashless payments.
The company is currently working on a seller app that enables more merchants to get online. “Using this, merchants can upload their products onto several social networking sites at the click of a button, with the items being displayed with an embedded ‘buy now’ button for users. This will provide convenience and reduce friction in the payment process. We are also investing heavily in big data to simplify the consumer experience with the wallet,” says Gupta. The company makes money by charging a commission of 2% from merchants. It also charges Rs.50,000-100,000 per month from merchants using its analytics software. In October 2015, it raised $25 million from Sequoia, Ascent Capital and other investors, including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. It had earlier raised $7.5 million in separate rounds from Sequoia and some Japanese investors. Citrus’ wallet service has 25 million account holders and around 10,000 online and 7,000 offline merchants accept its services. It currently has payment volume of $2.25 billion and expects to touch $5 billion by the next financial year, since it plans to double its merchant base.
