US-based private equity firm General Atlantic and Singapore-based Temasek Holding are reportedly in final stages of discussion to acquire a significant amount of minority stake in BillDesk, an online payment processing platform, reported LiveMint.
As per the source, the investment value will be over $150 million. It is also reported that majority of the investment will be made by General Atlantic while Temasek Holdings will contribute just over a quarter of the investment.
Another report from TOI suggests that investment could be of around $200 million which will value the payment solution providing company at over $1 billion.
BillDesk was founded in 2000 by M.N. Srinivasu, Ajay Kaushal and Karthik Ganapathy. It provides online bill payment services to banks and billing companies in India.
The clientele of the company include leading banks such as State Bank of India, Citibank India, HDFC Bank Ltd, ICICI Bank Ltd, and telecom firms such as MTNL, Reliance Communications Ltd, Vodafone India, Bharti Airtel Ltd and Tata Teleservices Ltd.
This would be the company’s fourth round of funding. The company raised its first round of funding from SIDBI Venture Capital and Bank of Baroda, in 2001. After that, it raised $7.5 million in 2006 from Clearstone Venture Partners and State Bank of India. In 2012, it raised undisclosed amount of funding from TA Associates.
In India, BillDesk competes with other similar firms such as PayUmoney, Paytm, Citrus Payment Solutions and CC Avenue. Many startups in this space have raised significant amount of funding as well. This week, Razorpay secured $11.5 million in funding from Tiger Global Management and Matrix Partners.
As per the report – India Payment 2015 by Motilal Oswal Financial Services, the total online payment market in India is likely to grow at a compounded annual rate of 50% to cross Rs. 30,000 crore by 2020. The share of online payments, in the total bill payment market, is expected to rise from 0.5% in 2014 to 2.7% in 2019.
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