New Delhi, Jan 6 (PTI) Simpl, a pay-later platform, on Thursday said it has secured an asset-based facility from Franklin Templeton, Finuvo LLC and Catalina Finance to fund the rapid growth of its one-click pay-later offering.

"The funding line will support close to USD 1 billion in annual payment volume," said the buy-now-pay-later platform in a statement.

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The recent capital infusion, along with the Series-B funding last year, will allow Simpl to accelerate the growth of its existing businesses.

"Simpl will also be doubling its engineering, product, data science and sales teams to work on a suite of new merchant and consumer-facing products to enable zero friction commerce experiences," it said.

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Commenting on the financing, Simpl co-founder and CEO Nitya Sharma said, "Since the pandemic broke out, Simpl has seen even more acceptance among new customer cohorts."

He added that while the customer response validates its operating model, the current financing represents a landmark transaction by bringing blue-chip balance sheet partners on board, "which will allow us to scale the business quickly and efficiently".

After growing its merchant base by 10 times in the past 12 months to more than 10,000 online retailers, Simpl is seeing strong growth acceleration in user-base and payment volumes.

Besides the growing merchant network that now includes bellwethers such as Jio, Zomato, BigBasket and MakeMyTrip, Simpl's growth is fuelled by the rise of e-commerce and consumers' increasing demand for safe, seamless and cashless premium payment options.

Heather Hamilos, chief executive officer of Finuvo LLC, said, "Simpl's business model produces high-quality, short-duration receivables, and its underwriting mechanism has produced remarkably consistent results during a volatile period."

On the transaction, Simpl Chief Financial Officer Russell Byrne said that as the market appreciates the combination of low risk, short duration and high data visibility, "we now have a robust team of funding partners and infrastructure in place to scale the business".

Simpl has over 10,000 available merchants and over seven million users. HRS hrs

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)