Bengaluru, Feb 18 (IANS): Fastest-growing neobanking platform Open on Friday announced it has acquired Optobizz, a GST and financial automation startup for $5 million (about Rs 36 crore).

Hyderabad-based Optobizz is India's largest GST tax filing platform for tax practitioners that caters to over 30,000 tax practitioners and 8 lakh SMEs across the country.

The acquisition will increase Open's customer base from 10 lakh to 18 lakh SMEs. As part of the acquisition, the entire Optobizz team will join Open and Open will set up a development centre in Hyderabad.

"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 CEO, Open Financial Technologies Pvt Ltd.

Open is also set to launch a neo-banking platform targeted towards the one million tax practitioners and accountants in India.

Open is the largest and the fastest growing SME neo-banking platform in India that caters to over 10,00,000 SMEs and processes $24 billion in transactions annually.

"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," said Satyaprakash Buddhavarapu, CEO, Optobizz.