India's 1st Cross-Border Banking Platform - SALT Raises $500000 in the Pre-Seed Funding Round

Salt, India’s first cross-border payments platform for businesses today announced that it has raised $500,000 in a pre-seed round from various prestigious angel investors as well as founders of Indian startups. The bangalore-based startup, founded in 2020 by Ankit Parasher and Udita Pal, Salt, aims to empower the Indian SMBs and MSMEs by simplifying their banking operations and have more efficient global transactions.

The round was led by investors including Prashant Pansare (Founder Backer Capital, Airmeet), Amit Goel (ex-MEDICI), Vishrut Bubna (Verak, previously, BimaPe), Supermorpheus, and from Founders of various startups, including IIMJOBS, Cashoverflow, Orange Health, Cloudnine Hospitals, Bizongo, Loconav, Yellow Hospitality, Praxify, Letstransport, and NetNet.

Commenting on the funding round, Mr Ankit Parasher, Co-founder and CEO of SALT  said "We are at a cusp of growth in the Indian Impex industry, with   Govt pushing for a higher share in the 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”.

"With Salt, we aim 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 $300bn on a PAN India basis" he further added

Salt currently is India's first digital-only experience for SMEs for cross-border payments that helps in providing banking, documentation management, and workflow automation solutions to small-size exporters and importers who are actively dealing with international transactions.

The current round will help Salt in building the engineering team, product development as well as building new features as per the product roadmap

Commenting on the development, Mr. Prashant Pansare, Founder Backer Capital said "Ankit and Udita are building Salt for reducing complexities in the Cross-border transactions in India. The complexities and inefficiencies in global transactions for exporters need a robust and easy-to-use solution. This simplification would enable these businesses to scale globally."

Salt went live with the beta version of its Inward remittance product, which already has over 100 SMEs and businesses using it. The product will now be available to a more extensive set of exporters who want to receive payments from over 50 countries to India at the cheapest rates in over six currencies.

Applauding Salt’s proposition, Divyam Garg, owner of Shiryam technologies an SMB from Delhi said “Using Salt's Banking platform for receiving money from abroad has been a refreshing experience so far. It has made international banking effortless for us. And we are now spending way less time managing our transactions and saving way more money than before. As a medium-sized business dealing internationally daily, the long process and heavy charges can be too painful to bear with, and it finally feels like we have a service we always needed but never had”

MSMEs (Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises), currently contribute to 30% of India's GDP (CSO). This group of businesses accounts for 40% of India's exports. India's exports from April-March 2020-21 stood at an estimated $493.19 Billion. The annualized transaction volumes per customer in this segment (exporters/importers) is very high as compared to other fintech startups, with an average monthly cheque size being somewhere around 20,000-50,000 USD.