By Ajay Rag

Copyright indiatimes

Fintech platform Pelocal has raised $5 million in a funding round led by Unleash Capital Partners and Unicorn India Ventures, with a group of angel investors also participating.Noida-based Pelocal had earlier raised $2 million in a round last October from Unicorn India Ventures. The company said the latest funding will be used to expand product development and strengthen its go-to-market strategy.Founded in 2021 by Vivekanand Tripathi and Vikas Garg, Pelocal provides an artificial intelligence (AI)-led payments orchestration platform that embeds payments into WhatsApp and other messaging platforms. It enables enterprises to collect payments and engage with customers directly on these channels.The company’s services are currently used by more than 40 enterprises across banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), transit, and utilities. Some of its clients include Canara HSBC Life Insurance, Delhi Metro, Oriental Insurance, Mahanagar Gas, and Asianet Broadband.“Our focus was to solve at the intersection of payments and communication for vertical or domain-specific solutions for large enterprises. We saw that many enterprises were using older technologies, which was leading to poor efficiency in payment collection and customer convenience,” Tripathi told ET. “Then we started building solutions around WhatsApp and other communication platforms with deeply embedded journeys around payments and support.”Pelocal said total payment value has grown sixfold since its last fundraise, with annualised payment volumes now exceeding $500 million. The company currently operates at an annual revenue run rate (ARR) of over $1.5 million and expects this to reach $10 million in the next 18–24 months.“I think the core focus area of the company, in the next few years, is to double down on the entire technology work that we have been doing,” said Garg. “We are already a very large payment orchestration platform with more than 40 enterprises actively using it on a month-on-month basis. But with the advent of AI, I think the entire trajectory for us to serve our enterprises is only going to get better.”Investor appetite in this space has been growing, driven by the rise of conversational commerce and embedded payments in India.“Pelocal is redefining how enterprises interact and transact with customers by embedding payments into conversational interfaces like WhatsApp. With AI at the core, the company is solving a large-scale problem for Indian businesses and has the potential to scale globally,” said Natsuki Sugai, managing partner, Unleash Capital Partners.Pelocal competes with companies such as Gupshup and Twilio, which also help enterprises integrate payments and customer engagement on messaging platforms such as WhatsApp. While these larger rivals offer a wide suite of conversational AI and communication APIs across industries, Pelocal focuses specifically on embedding end-to-end payment journeys for enterprises in sectors such as BFSI, transit, and utilities.