Escrow banking platform Castler raises $5 Mn in pre-Series A round

Global escrow banking platform Castler has raised $5 million in a pre-Series A round co-led by Capital 2B (an Info Edge fund) and IIFL Fintech Fund. The funding round also saw participation of Stride Ventures and Piper Serica along with returning investors Zerodha, Venture Catalysts, 9Unicorns, and FAAD Network.

Castler had previously raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed and seed round from Zerodha, Venture Catalysts, 9Unicorns, FAAD Network, Lets Venture, and AngelList in 2021.

The fresh proceeds will be deployed to further grow its domestic and cross-border escrow product portfolio, expand its banking partnerships to 25 banks and grow its business 10x over the next couple of years, 

Co-founded in April 2021 by Vineet Singh and Dinesh Kumar, the company aims to build a global escrow platform for both domestic and cross border transactions on the pillars of good governance and responsible execution. Castler recently appointed Kumar Amit, ex-VP Razorpay as co-founder and COO towards its endeavour of scaling the business.

Castler says that it simplifies and completely digitises escrow banking for mass adoption and make trust an implicit part of all digital transactions and smart contracts. Its unique banking stack is the middle-ware between banks and enterprises to solve the problems of ever changing business and revenue models, complex transaction flows, source of money, identity verification, fraud management and customer-consumer protection.

Castler claims to work with 10 banking partners and is the trusted escrow solution for over 500 enterprises and manages over Rs 5,000 crore in transactions every month.