Leading fintech player Razorpay on Tuesday announced its first international expansion with the acquisition of a majority stake in Curlec, a leading Malaysian fintech startup, for an undisclosed sum. E-commerce is booming in Malaysia with an estimated market size of $21 billion in 2021 and is poised to grow further to over $35 billion by 2025.

Razorpay said that with acquiring Curlec, it will further unveil new channels for global business expansion for online businesses based in India and Malaysia. "With the vast experience in a heterogenous market like India over the last seven years, our expansion to the Southeast Asia payments market is timed exactly to coincide with the company's growing dominance in all things payments," said Harshil Mathur, CEO and Co-Founder, Razorpay.

Curlec was founded by Zac Liew and Steve Kucia in 2018. The company builds new-age technology solutions on top of existing payments infrastructure, to make it easier for companies of all sizes, to collect recurring payments and take control of their cash flows.

Initially backed by 500 global and other investors, the company's annual revenue has been growing at nearly 5X since 2018. "We look forward to the next phase of our journey and scaling together across Malaysia and Southeast Asia," said Liew.

This marks Razorpay's fourth acquisition overall, and its first in the international market. Prior to this, the company acquired TERA Finlabs, (AI-based risk tech SaaS Platform) in 2021, Opfin (Payroll & HR management solution) in 2019 and Thirdwatch (Fraud Analytics AI-platform) in 2018.

Razorpay serves over eight million businesses including Facebook, Ola, Zomato, Swiggy, Cred and achieved $60 billion total payment volume (TPV) as of December 2021.