Looks like Whatsapp’s payments introduction has finally (finally!!) brought some good omen for the otherwise, genuinely cry-baby behaving, Paytm.
India’s largest digital payments company, has witnessed a secondary share sale in the range of $50-70 million. This will make its valuation rise as high as $10 billion, just behind India’s startup poster boy for over a decade, Flipkart. This process will see few of the existing investors and former employees sell a portion of their shares to the new investors. Reportedly, Discovery Capital is one of the new investors that will be stepping in. Such kind of share sales is becoming one of the major reasons for exits for venture capital firms in the nation.
The startup, owned by Vijay Shekhar Sharma, gained an enormous prominence when the waves of demonetization hit the country in November 2016. Also, it is one of the 11 entities to have received a payments bank license from the Reserve Bank of India. It was last valued at $7 billion in May 2017 when it had picked an enormous funding of $1.4 billion from SoftBank Group. This was another jump from its valuation of $5 billion in August 2016. The company has been pushing extraordinarily in the span of these two years.
Top-level exit: SVP of gaming unit resigns
In a separate story, Dushyant Saraswat, senior vice-president of the Nodia-headquartered company has quit. Confirming the news, he revealed he intends to set up his own firm. He used to oversee the mobile gaming joint venture of Paytm, and AGTech Media Holdings, owned by Alibaba. Before this, he had worked as head of digital business of The Walt Disney Company.
Yeah., Paytm kind of, has a gaming unit as well.
This development came in today, moments after Paytm Gold head Krishna Hegde, another senior vice president had stepped down.
The digital payments cum ecommerce brand, has been increasingly expanding into four distinct domains, namely, Paytm Mall, Paytm Money, Paytm Wallet and Paytm Payments Bank under its parent company, One97 Communications. It intends to roll out various other financial services offerings.
Just a day before, the company had also launched Paytm for Business app on Android Play Store. This will enable merchants to adopt the method of digital payments swiftly. They can sign up, get a Paytm QR code instantly, print it and begin using at their stores to accept payments to their bank accounts without any charge. They can also manage their daily payments using the app, check the past transactions and trace them to their banks.
