In April 2020, BEENEXT, an early stage venture capital firm based in Singapore put in Series ‘A’ funding of $4.5 million in YAP (Your API Platform). Earlier, it got an Angel funding round in February 2020 from some fintech entrepreneurs. YAP is an application program interface (API) infrastructure company founded on 2014. It helps businesses to connect and roll out their own branded products. Around $2 billion worth of transactions were processed last year (March 2020), up 4 times from $2,450 million last year, accounting for a revenue of Rs30 crore. “I have been actively looking for a ‘fintech anywhere’ platform company in India for the past 12 months and I was very pleased when I met Madhu, Muthu and Prabhu and heard about their very unique journey. We agreed very quickly to partner,” says Dirk Van Quaquebeke, managing partner, BEENEXT. “It was short and sweet,” adds he. “I discovered YAP when our fintech portfolio companies began using their payment infrastructure APIs to launch their card offerings. We backed Madhu and his team in their seed round and are delighted to invest in them again now,” says Vikram Chachra, founding partner, 8i Ventures. “YAP has played a crucial role in the evolution of fintech ecosystem in India. As a provider of digital payments infrastructure, it is well-placed to benefit from the continuing adoption of digital finance channels by Indian households and companies,” says Shivashish Chatterjee, co-founder, DMI group. “When we planned our collaboration with YAP it was mainly for the technology stack that the company was building in-house, which really sold the deal for us,” says Rajan Bajaj, founder, SlicePay. “YAP started with the fundamental thought process of helping businesses get access to financial services products and make a platform for them to take it out as their own product for today’s customers,” explains Madhusudanan R, co-founder, YAP. He has over 16 years of experience in the field of digital payment and has worked with Citibank, Visa and many other firms as a product evangelist. And over the past five years, it has been partnering with 25 banks across Asia and has 200 plus fintech partnerships. Global perspective Madhusudanan’s two co-founders are Muthukumar A. – over 20 years of experience in technology and has worked with Paypal, Visa as an engineer and chief architect – while Prabhu Rangarajan has 14 years of experience in technology and has worked with Verizon, Cognizant as an engineer and operations head.