While Indian consumers enjoy slick, app-based digital banking experiences, corporate banking is still stuck in the slow lane — weighed down by clunky infrastructure, manual reconciliations, and endless spreadsheets. That’s the pain point Mumbai-based TransBnk is tackling, and now it has $25 million in fresh capital from Bessemer Venture Partners to accelerate its push.
Over the last decade, consumer fintech in India has exploded. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) turned everyday transactions into instant, cashless experiences, while digital wallets and payment aggregators rewired how people move money. But for businesses, especially in transaction banking — covering payments, collections, treasury, and reconciliations — little has changed. Corporate customers are still forced to juggle multiple internet banking portals and crunch numbers manually.
This inefficiency stands in stark contrast to the scale of the opportunity. India is home to nearly 75 million small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the world’s largest SME market, all of which would benefit from modern financial infrastructure. According to a February 2024 report by Chiratae Ventures and The Digital Fifth, the country’s B2B fintech market could swell to $20 billion by 2030. Yet most of India’s 26 fintech unicorns — worth a collective $90 billion — have focused on payments and lending, not the plumbing of corporate banking.
That’s where TransBnk steps in. Founded in 2022 by former bankers Vaibhav Tambe, Lavin Kotian, Pulak Jain, and Sachin Gupta, the startup pitches itself as a “common operating system” for banks and businesses. The platform acts as a single window into the banking ecosystem, built on a modular microservices architecture that enables use cases like liquidity management, escrow, and treasury services.
“During our banking days, clients constantly asked for a consolidated platform for transaction banking,” said Tambe, co-founder and CEO, in an interview. “The challenge was integrating multiple banks into a single stack. That’s what we set out to solve.”
So far, TransBnk has onboarded 60 banks — 40 of them fully integrated — and supports 220 customers. Of these, 80% are merchants, including lenders, fintechs, and NBFCs, while the remaining 20% are banks that white-label TransBnk’s platform for their corporate clients. On the back end, the system processes around 110 million transactions a month, spanning 11,000 bank accounts and leveraging more than 1,500 APIs.
The traction is already paying off. In the past year, TransBnk’s revenue has surged 12x, reaching about $12 million in annual recurring revenue. The company turned profitable in February, with healthy gross margins of around 80%.
Globally, enterprise-focused fintech players like Finastra, Temenos, Infosys’ Finacle, and U.S.-based Treasury Prime are building similar infrastructure. But in India, few startups have attempted this — largely because it requires not just deep technical expertise, but also trust and access. Integrating with banks’ legacy core systems and weaving them into enterprise software stacks like ERPs is no small feat.
The Series B round also saw participation from Fundamentum, Arkam Ventures, 8i Ventures, Accion, and Japan’s GMO Venture Partners, along with $4 million in secondary share sales. With this funding, TransBnk has raised about $26 million to date. The company says its valuation jumped 7x from its previous round, though it hasn’t disclosed specifics.
Next up, TransBnk plans to expand beyond India, targeting Southeast Asia and the Middle East. It’s also eyeing new verticals such as real estate, pharmaceuticals, and renewable energy, where complex financial workflows are ripe for digitization.
As India’s consumer fintech revolution matures, the corporate side is finally getting its turn. For TransBnk, the timing — and the opportunity — couldn’t be better.