Mintoak, a SaaS platform serving banks and merchant acquirers, has raised Rs 71 crore in a secondary funding round.

The round saw early-growth investor Z3Partners acquire a minority stake from some of Mintoak’s initial institutional investors.

“This fundraiser is a good validation of the value we’ve delivered to some of our early backers,” said Raman Khanduja, CEO and Co-founder of Mintoak. “We’re excited to welcome Z3Partners to our journey and look forward to leveraging their expertise as we scale to new heights.”

Mintoak is a merchant SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform that helps banks and merchant acquirers improve their engagement with small and medium enterprises (SMEs). It provides payment processing services and tools for cross-selling, loyalty programmes, and gamified customer engagement campaigns.

The New Delhi-based platform counts major banks such as HDFC Bank, State Bank of India, Axis Bank, and YES Bank among its clients. The platform has also expanded internationally, working with banks like Absa and Network International. Operating in six countries, Mintoak handles more than $50 billion in annual gross merchandise value (GMV) and processes over $3 billion in transactions every year.

“Mintoak’s remarkable product-led growth and innovation are redefining how Banks and SMEs collaborate, demonstrating trust and transaction scale. Their leadership team has world-class capability in working with Banks and Merchants globally with their prior experience at leading financial institutions,” said Gautam Patel, Founder and Managing Partner at Z3Partners. “We’re thrilled to support their global ambition and transformative efforts in the merchant-acquirer ecosystem.”

In February 2023, Mintoak raised $20 million in Series A funding round led by PayPal Ventures with participation from British International Investment. In the same funding round, HDFC Bank increased its stake in the startup to 7.75% from 5.20%, while another existing investor, Pravega Ventures, also participated along with a few other institutional investors.

The Entrepreneurship Cell (E-Cell) of IIT Madras has unveiled Elevate 8.0, the 8th edition of its flagship national startup competition. Aimed at fostering entrepreneurial spirit and nurturing groundbreaking ideas, Elevate has emerged as a springboard for startups looking to make a name in the competitive business world.

About IIT Madras E-Cell – Driving Innovation and Entrepreneurship

The Entrepreneurship Cell of IIT Madras is a student-driven organisation that plays a pivotal role in shaping India’s innovation landscape. Known for nurturing cutting-edge ideas and empowering budding entrepreneurs, E-Cell has consistently provided crucial mentorship, resources, and a thriving investor network. Elevate is one of its marquee initiatives, enabling startups to connect with investors, industry leaders, and mentors, solidifying E-Cell’s reputation as a beacon of innovation and excellence.

Introducing New Tracks for 2025

Elevate 8.0 comes with exciting new opportunities for startups by introducing two specialised tracks:

• Tech Track – Dedicated exclusively to technology-driven startups.
• Sector-Agnostic Track – Open to startups across various industries (excluding tech).

These tracks ensure that both tech pioneers and innovative startups from other sectors receive tailored guidance, fostering growth across the entrepreneurial spectrum.

What Participants Can Gain – The Prizes and Perks

Startups competing in Elevate 8.0 stand a chance to unlock life-changing opportunities:

• Investment Pool – Over ₹30 crores in potential funding from IIT Madras’ expansive investor network.
• Cash Prizes – A ₹3 lakh prize pool rewarding innovation and excellence.
• Startup Incentives – Support from Awfis, MSG91, and CleverTap, offering access to co-working spaces, communication platforms, and analytics tools.
• Travel Perks – Abhibus and Ease My Trip provide travel benefits to ensure smooth participation.
• Live Product Showcase – A rare opportunity to pitch products to a national audience and capture attention from investors and industry leaders.

Three Phases of the Competition

The competition follows a structured three-phase model:

1. Online Screening (7th Jan to 20th Jan) – Initial evaluation of applications.
2. Zonal Rounds (1st Feb to 10th Feb) – Conducted in cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi, and Chennai.
3. Grand Finale (28th Feb to 2nd March) – Top startups will pitch their ideas live to investors and mentors.

Unparalleled Mentorship and Industry Connections

Participants in Elevate 8.0 will receive invaluable mentorship from seasoned entrepreneurs and industry leaders. VCs from renowned firms like Antler VC, Kalaari Capital, Titan Capital, and Equanimity will be part of the judging panel. Startups will also gain insights and guidance from top angel investors, ensuring they are well-equipped to refine their strategies and scale operations.

Celebrating Success – Past Winners’ Journey

Elevate has consistently produced successful startups that have left a mark in various sectors. Previous winners, including UR Advanced Tech, Evoride, Monkoodog, and Hesa Technologies, have achieved significant milestones, showcasing the competition’s effectiveness in nurturing promising startups.

Who Can Apply?

Elevate 8.0 is open to startups from across India, with a focus on innovative businesses that possess a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or are market-ready. Whether you’re in tech or another domain, this is the perfect platform to take your startup to the next level.

How to Register

Registrations for Elevate 8.0 are now open. Startups can apply through the Elevate website or via Unstop. Secure your spot and take the next big leap in your entrepreneurial journey.

Elevate Your Startup Journey

Seize this unparalleled opportunity to scale your business, connect with industry leaders, and elevate your startup’s growth trajectory. Don’t miss out – register now and take the first step toward transforming your vision into reality.

When you pull the plug, the lights go off. Thankfully, in the “analogue world”, a backup power supply kicks in so that essential services can continue normally while we try to resolve the issue at hand.

When it comes to the digital world, things are not that simple.

The backup plan

When a simple programming error wreaked havoc in IT systems worldwide and India during the CrowdStrike global IT outage, the company was able to quickly provide a remedy, albeit an unscalable remedy that required a manual reboot of affected machines.

Imagine a scenario where they were still struggling to identify the cause of the issue. How would customers mitigate the issues? Do they have “digital backup power”?

Our smartphones have multiple chat, messaging, email, banking, and browser apps. But why? If one goes down, we can quickly switch to another without downtime. What we are doing is building digital resiliency on our mobile devices.

What is digital resilience?

Digital resilience refers to an organisation’s ability to adapt, recover, and maintain its essential functions and integrity in the face of challenges, disruptions, and cyber threats in the digital environment.

In today’s hyper-connected world, when technology fails, we encounter major problems such as losing access to banking services, air travel disruptions, being unable to perform regular chores like purchasing groceries, etc. With a population of 1.4 billion people, the scale of the problems increases significantly, leading to increased costs.

According to a report, the median cost of IT outages at Indian organisations stands at around Rs 520 crore per year.

What can compromise an organisation’s digital resilience?

There are a variety of threats that can disrupt IT services. Outages can result from power failures, hardware issues, software glitches, and human errors. Cybersecurity attacks, such as software supply chain exploits, paid “as-a-service” attacks, and Gen AI-based attacks, can also bring down IT services. Finally, disruptions can also result from issues with cloud providers or third-party vendors.

Role of the government in preserving business continuity

Governments worldwide are setting up various regulations and acts to prioritise digital resilience.

On April 30, 2024, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) released an updated Guidance Note on operational risk management and operational resilience. The guidance emphasises the importance of sound operational risk management for financial institutions, stressing the need for proactive identification, assessment, and management to strengthen operation resilience, and safeguard against potential risks and losses.

Singapore’s central bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), has business continuity management guidelines to help financial institutions be resilient against service disruptions arising from IT outages, pandemic outbreaks, cyberattacks and physical threats.

Singapore also has a Cybersecurity (Amendment) Bill, which requires the owners of critical services to report a wide range of cybersecurity incidents.

In Europe, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is a regulatory framework for the financial sector on digital operational resilience, whereby all financial firms need to ensure they can withstand, respond to, and recover from all types of IT-related disruptions and threats.

In the US, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has a Resilience Services Branch that provides guidance to secure and enhance the resilience of the nation’s critical infrastructure systems.

However, regulations alone can’t fully ensure business continuity. Organisations must also make informed IT decisions when developing their IT strategy.

What can organisations do to improve their digital resilience posture?

First and foremost, organisations need to be able to make IT choices with ease. Consolidating with one IT vendor can ease engagement and perhaps, reduce costs. However, it can also increase software concentration risk, since you have put all your eggs in one basket.

A smarter choice would be to adopt a multi-vendor strategy for key software infrastructure powering your essential services, for example, leveraging more than one type of Operating System for your servers or using more than one distribution of Kubernetes for your containerized applications.

In this way, you can quickly switch to alternate solutions during disruptions.

Secondly, organisations should leverage open, interoperable, and vendor-agnostic solutions that provide flexibility to adopt different vendor solutions and not be locked in to a particular vendor. It enables them to create IT architectures that support digital resiliency.

Thirdly, ensure that your infrastructure is sized appropriately. For example, the RBI has emphasised the need for banks to invest adequately in IT infrastructure as per business growth and transaction volume to reduce the frequency of IT outages. 

Next, frameworks must be established to identify mission-critical services and operations and develop an alternative technology stack for them.

Finally, ensure that there is ready access to technical expertise to support the IT infrastructures.

IT outages are part and parcel of the digital world. What’s important is that organisations have sufficient IT choices that enable them to respond quickly and withstand such disruptions.

Vishal Ghariwala is the Senior Director and CTO – Asia Pacific at SUSE.