Zeta Secures Series C Investment Of Nearly $60 Million From Sodexo At $300 Million Valuation; Gives Equity Stake

Fintech start-up Zeta has received a Series C investment of under $60 million from Sodexo at a valuation of $300 million. With this investment, Sodexo will have a minority stake of under 20 per cent in Zeta. Avendus Capital was the exclusive financial adviser to Zeta in the investment process.

Zeta started its journey in 2015 in the digital meal benefit market. Zeta’s present product portfolio includes a full stack, cloud-native, neo-banking platform for issuance of credit, debit and prepaid products that enable legacy banks and new age fintech institutions to launch retail and corporate fintech products. It also includes an enterprise solution for corporates, such as automated cafeteria, employee gifting and rewards and recognition.

With this new capital, Zeta will look at expanding its cloud banking platform and digital payments solutions across global markets — US, UK, Europe and South-East Asia.

“Today’s banking and fintech ecosystem requires cloud-native, privacy-aware, inherently secure, API first banking and payment solutions. This new investment, will further our vision to accelerate to a world where payments are invisible and seamless. We will be expanding our operations to 7-10 countries in the next 18 months, with full-fledged teams in each new country. We will also double our engineering team with 200 new hires” said Bhavin Turakhia, Co-founder and CEO, Zeta.

Until now, Zeta has been funded by co-founders Bhavin Turakhia and Ramki Gaddipati, who have collectively invested $40 million to date. This is the first time that billion serial entrepreneur Turakhia has raised capital for one of his many ventures. Turakhia said: “We have extremely ambitious plans to scale Zeta across the globe. The advantage with Sodexo is that they are a strategic partner and are committed to much more than just the investment. While they can use our platform elsewhere in the world, we can work with their customer base across the globe.” Sodexo has 100 million users in 80 countries.

Zeta provides its platform and products to corporates in India, Asia and Latin America . Its products are used by RBL Bank, IDFC First Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank, 14,000 corporate firms and over two million users

“At Zeta, we have been creating a robust platform to solve for use cases that could not be addressed through legacy approaches. The investment from Sodexo will also allow us to enhance our capabilities in AI, ML and predictive analytics so that we can offer better services with more actionable information to our clients and users” said Ramki Gaddipati, Co-founder and CTO, Zeta.

“Beyond BRS, Sodexo group would further benefit from Zeta’s comprehensive technological suite of solutions to foster synergies across activities and offer a seamless payment experience to our consumers. Zeta and Sodexo are already working on deploying Zeta’s know-how in several Benefits and Rewards Services subsidiaries across different regions” said Aurelien Sonet, CEO, Sodexo Benefits & Rewards Services.