Open Acquires Tax Filing Platform Optobizz For $5 Mn The acquisition will help the platform cement its leadership in the SME neo-banking space and enhance its product capabilities on automating GST and tax compliance
By Prabhjeet Bhatla •
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Neobanking platform Open on Thursday announced the acquisition of goods and services tax (GST) and financial automation startup Optobizz, for $5 million. This will raise Open's customer base from 10,00,000 to 18,00,000 small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Hyderabad-based Optobizz platform offers an end-to-end GST and financial automation platform that comes with an end to account receivable and account payable platform with integrated GST filing and reconciliation for tax practitioners and SMEs.
"Adding the Optobizz team to the Open family has really strengthened our team. With close to 15 years of experience at product tech companies on the business finance side, their expertise will help us create more innovative solutions for small businesses across the country. The addition of tax filing to our platform will enable our merchants to not just manage banking, payments, and automated accounting seamlessly but will also solve the major hassle of tax filing," said Anish Achuthan, co-founder and chief executive officer, Open Financial Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
The acquisition, which is part cash and part stock, will help the neobanking platform cement its leadership in the SME neo-banking space and enhance its product capabilities on automating GST and tax compliance.
Further, the platform is also getting ready to launch a neo-banking platform targeted towards the 1 million tax practitioners and accountants in India. The platform will enable accountants to offer a branded business banking services with integrated tax and accounting services to their clients and comes integrated with tools to manage their practice.
Open also recently launched the TDS payment feature on the platform allowing small businesses to pay their taxes through the platform. This also allows merchants to manage all their tax payments in one place with 24/7 access to the payment challan and payment history.
"We are super excited to join the Open family. Open has been raising the bar by helping more than 10,00,000 small businesses manage their finances. The synergies are tremendous. As a part of Open, we will accelerate our vision to digitally transform business banking and making it a more meaningful experience with more value-added features for not just SMEs but also tax practitioners operating in India. Our focus has been to empower the tax practitioner community and we will help them with end-to-end compliance and powerful business banking tools to help themselves and their clients," added Satyaprakash Buddhavarapu, chief executive officer, Optobizz.
Open is backed by global investors like Tiger Global, Speedinvest, Beenext, Recruit Strategic Partners, AngelList, 3one4 Capital, Unicorn India Ventures, Tanglin Venture Partner Advisors among others, and has raised $35 million funding, to date.
