Salt to ramp up hiring in India; raises USD 500,000 funding

Fintech firm Salt on Monday said it has raised USD 500,000 (about Rs 3.7 crore) and is looking at strengthening its headcount to about 100 by the end of next year. Salt, which offers a cross-border payments platform for businesses, also aims to grow the monthly transactions on the platform to USD 10 million by 2022. The current monthly transactions on the platform stand at about USD 100,000.

Founded in 2020 by Ankit Parasher and Udita Pal, Salt currently provides inward remittance products, which helps businesses receive money from over 50 countries in six currencies. It provides a banking, documentation management, and workflow automation platform for exporters and importers (manufacturing and services) across India.

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“We are at a cusp of growth in the Indian Impex (import-export) industry, with the government pushing for a higher share in world trade to become an export hub. We require robust banking and compliance products for this industry to support the scale of transactions in a rapidly changing regulatory environment coupled with higher customer expectations, Salt co-founder and CEO Ankit Parasher said.

He added that the company aims to build a bridge between banking and small businesses for the import/export industry in India by providing a one-stop solution for all their banking needs to support their interactional transactions which currently stands worth USD 300 billion on a pan-India basis.

The Bengaluru-based company has raised USD 500,000 in a pre-seed round from Prashant Pansare (Backer Capital founder), Amit Goel (ex-MEDICI), Vishrut Bubna (Verak), Supermorpheus and other entrepreneurs. The current round will help Salt in building the engineering team, product development as well as building new features as per the product roadmap, Parasher said. He added that the company’s current headcount is about 20, and the company plans to expand it to 100 by 2022.