India’s leading online mobile recharge platform FreeCharge today announced that it has raised $80 million (approx. INR 480 crore) in funding. The investors for the fresh round includes San Francisco-based head fund Valiant Capital Management and Hong Kong-based hedge fund Tybourne Capital Management.
The round also saw participation from existing investors—Sequoia Capital, RuNet and Sofina.
“This round of funding will be primarily used for product innovations on mobile, team expansion and marketing,” said Alok Goel, CEO of FreeCharge.
Founded in 2010, the website enables users to recharge pre-paid and post-paid mobile phones online and get rewarded with discount shopping coupons for using its site.
It offers promotions or discounts from various food joints and retailers every time a customer uses its platform for a recharge.
The company claims that the mobile transactions on Freecharge app have grown around 60x in the last one year driven through 10 million app downloads.
Sandeep Tandon, Co-Founder, FreeCharge said, “2014 has been a year where the innovative work put in by the team has been widely recognised. At the presitigious IAMAI awards FreeCharge won the Best Consumer Mobile Service & Best Ecommerce Website (Specialized Category) in India. We also bagged the Effie award for our launch marketing campaign Recharge Nahi FreeCharge”.
Earlier in September, FreeCharge had raised $33 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Sofina and Ru-Net.
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