23 February, 2021: Open, Asia’s fastest growing neo-banking platform today announced the acquisition of Optobizz, India’s leading GST and financial automation startup for $5 million. This will raise Open’s customer base from 10,00,000 to 18,00,000 SMEs. Hyderabad based Optobizz platform offers an end to end GST and financial automation platform that comes with an end to Account Receivable & Account Payable platform with integrated GST filing and reconciliation for tax practitioners and SMEs.
The acquisition, which is part cash and part stock, will help Open cement its leadership in the SME neo-banking space and enhance its product capabilities on automating GST and Tax compliance. Further Open is also getting ready to launch a neo-banking platform targeted towards the 1 million tax practitioners and accountants in India. The platform will enable accountants to offer a branded business banking services with integrated Tax & accounting service to their clients and comes integrated with tools to manage their practice. As a part of the acquisition, the entire team of Optobizz will join Open and Open will be setting up a development centre in Hyderabad.
Open already offers a neo-banking platform that helps over 10,00,000 SMEs and startups to automate and run their finances effectively. Open has all the tools that helps businesses send and receive payments, automate their accounting, expense management, combined with developer-friendly APIs that help SMEs integrate banking into their business workflows. This also allows merchants to manage all their tax payments in one place with 24*7 access to the payment challan and payment history.
Commenting on the acquisition, Anish Achuthan, Co-founder and CEO, Open Financial Technologies Pvt. Ltd said, “Adding the Optobizz team to the Open family has really strengthened our team. With close to 15 years of experience at product tech companies on the business finance side, their expertise will help us create more innovative solutions for small businesses across the country. Addition of tax filing to our platform will enable our merchants to not just manage banking, payments and automated accounting seamlessly but will also solve the major hassle of tax filing.”
Satyaprakash Buddhavarapu, CEO, Optobizz
said, “We are super excited to join the Open family. Open has been raising the bar by helping more than 10,00,000 small businesses manage their finances. The synergies are tremendous. As a part of Open we will accelerate our vision to digitally transform business banking and making it a more meaningful experience with more value added features for not just SMEs but also tax practitioners operating in India. Our focus has been to empower the tax practitioner community and we will help them with end to end compliance and powerful business banking tools to help themselves and their clients”
Source: Business World
