Bengaluru/Mumbai: Autonomous banking platform BusinessNext has raised $40 million in a Series B round from ServiceNow Ventures, the venture capital arm of US-based cloud computing software company ServiceNow.
The new round has led investors to bump the company's valuation to $700 million, significantly higher than its last reported valuation of $181 million in 2021. With the investment, ServiceNow will hold roughly a 5% stake in the Noida-based company.
“…what this investment does is give us market access very quickly,” said company chief executive and co-founder Nishant Singh, in an interview with Mint. “We get access to the entire go-to-market structure that ServiceNow has, which is a large team across several geographies.”
The partnership with ServiceNow gives the Noida-based startup access to newer markets in Southeast Asia, as well as New Zealand and Australia. While the company already has feelers out for what it called ‘quick wins,’ Singh declined to comment on how much they'd contribute overall, given that these would be partnerships with ServiceNow. “I see it being a strong contributor of revenue.”
BusinessNext had last raised a $16 million equity round in 2021, co-led by Avataar Ventures and Ascent Capital.
Amid AI push
The company's round comes at a time when enterprises globally are accelerating the deployment of artificial intelligence in their workflows and internal ecosystems. While banks have traditionally been the fastest adopters of frontier technologies, AI has made it so that they remain cautious, on account of its blackbox, i.e. inexplicable, nature.
Areas where banks are deploying AI, like other enterprises, include back-office roles such as customer complaint classification, bias elimination, and even contact centre roles. It's why BusinessNext has seen its platform solutions across lending, customer service and agentic solutions pick up.
"Banks will have to shift compliance from retrospective auditing to real-time software engineering. Regulators will not accept a ‘black box’ excuse for breaches,” said Anupam Shukla, partner at Pioneer Legal. To stay compliant, he said banks need strict access controls, isolated cloud systems, and a fully auditable trail of every AI agent's actions.
Some of BusinessNext's competitors in the space include customer relationship management behemoth Salesforce, homegrown small and medium business-focused Zoho, Nasdaq-listed Freshworks, Hubspot, Leadsquared and a few others.
At the same time, AI is making banks look for ways to improve efficiency. “AI is not a push for our customers, it's a pull. Boards want to do more with AI because they're optimising for more revenue per employee,” said Singh.
Leading clients
Today, the startup works with several leading financial institutions in the country, including HDFC Bank, SBI General, Axis Bank, Jana Small Finance Bank, AU Small Finance Bank, IndusInd Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, and Ujjivan Small Finance Bank.
The company's clientele accounts for 55% of its overall revenue, with the balance coming from Europe, West Asia, Africa, and Southeast Asia (25%) and the US (20%). As of FY25, BusinessNext's revenue stood at ₹312 crore, with net profit at ₹3.1 crore, according to data from Tracxn.
While Singh said that the company remains bullish on an India listing, it doesn't have a timeline in place just yet. This year's public market offerings by startups have slowed considerably due to volatility caused by the war in West Asia between the US and Iran. Several companies have delayed their listings, including PhonePe and Flipkart.
“…it is expected that pure-play technology companies should benefit from the Indian IPO market. Having said this, such companies may take a cautious approach given their global revenue model rather than the Indian consumer-focused model and prevalent IPO window conditions…,” said Narendra Dingankar, partner at Pioneer Legal.