Invoice Bazaar, a FinTech Supply Chain Finance platform with presence across Asia today announced an undisclosed investment in online document exchange platform ODeX. ODeX, a one stop solution provider for digitizing the shipping ecosystem, is a market leader in its vertical and has a product used by all the shipping stakeholders in India.
As part of ODeX’s proposition, it already works with Invoice Bazaar in India for enabling payment settlements to shipping companies. ODeX along with Invoice Bazaar’s is working on solving the Supply Chain Finance problem in the shipping industry. The investment from Invoice Bazaar will be used towards expanding ODeX’s footprint in Middle East as well as towards product development.
ODeX – An Online Document Exchange Platform connects all the stakeholders in the shipping ecosystem, manage the workflow in the ecosystem by digitizing the manual documentation exchange, collect payments and is now able to offer early payment option with the partnership with Invoice Bazaar. In the last 30 months since founding, ODeX has built an enviable ecosystem with marquee shipping lines including COSCO Shipping, CMA CGM, Hapag-Llyod, Hamburg Sud, clients including Reliance, TATA Group, CEAT, Vedanta, DHL, Godrej, and a number of customer brokers, freight brokers, banks, CFS, Weighbridge operators in its network.
ODeX has the platform that can scale up across emerging markets. Shipping is a $7 trillion economy and business from documentation automation is a multi-billion dollar opportunity. 556 million containers (TeU’s) carried across the world generates 11 billion documents which leads to a huge opportunity for trade document digitization and finance.
Speaking on this fund raise Liji Nowal, Managing Director of ODeX commented “We value the investment from Invoice Bazaar as they bring extensive financial management and credit structuring skills. We have already benefited from working with Invoice Bazaar as a partner and I am sure the investment from Invoice Bazaar will lead to further deepening of our relationship to complete an important pillar of our client proposition viz credit.”
Invoice Bazaar is seeking to expand its Supply Chain Finance reach to the shipping industry through this minority acquisition. With presence in United Arab Emirates, and a limited presence in India, the 2 year old FinTech company has crossed early payment volumes of AED 100Million (US$27Million) in the last 18 months since it started operating. “This is purely a strategic investment. ODeX has a strong management team with deep understanding of the shipping ecosystem. We are seeking to leverage their platform to expand our presence in the shipping niche” said Anand Nagaraj, CEO of Invoice Bazaar.
