Barely months after the closure of a $600 million investment round, the Noida-based digital payments provider Pine Labs has raised another $100 million from US-based investment management company Invesco Developing Markets Fund.
Pine Labs, which is one of the leading merchant commerce platforms in Asia, is slated to go public in the near future. Ahead of its IPO, it has been actively raising capital and making acquisitions – it acquired fintech platform Rave this April. Pine Labs was valued at $3 billion in July, and its valuation after the recent round could not be determined.
“Over the last 18 months we have scaled our Prepaid Issuing stack, Online Payments, and also the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) offering. We continue to make progress in the larger Asian markets with our BNPL platform. Very excited to have a marquee investor like Invesco join us in the journey,” said Amrish Rau, Pine Labs CEO. The start-up has reportedly appointed Wall Street bankers Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to advise it regarding its IPO and is eyeing a valuation of $6 billion for its IPO.
“The Invesco Developing Markets Fund is pleased to invest in Pine Labs, a leading fintech services company in India that fits our strategy of seeking high-quality companies that have durable long-term growth potential,” said Justin Leverenz, CIO of Developing Markets Equities at Invesco.
The fintech industry in India has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic, and has grown by leaps and bounds as people have been forced to go online to make payments. Digital transactions have skyrocketed since March 2020, to the delight of fintech start-ups, which have scaled up their businesses and expanded into new markets. Pine Labs has had a slice of this pie as well, as it has expanded to 3, 700 cities across Asia and the Middle East and currently serves over 6 million consumers across over 40, 000 merchant establishments. The acquisition of Fave further enabled it to enter the consumer payments sector and expand its footprint in the markets.
Backed by names such as Sequoia Capital, PayPal, Mastercard, and Temasek, the start-up provides a range of financial services including merchant payment, PoS, invoice management, payment gateway, issuing prepaid cards, and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) solutions. Its PoS machines offer merchants a wide variety of additional services and the start-up processes tens of billions of payment transactions – in fact, its payments terminal has integrations with over two dozen banks and financial and technology partners. It is today the third-highest-valued fintech firm in the world’s second-largest internet market, behind Paytm and PhonePe, and had recorded net revenue of ₹800 crores in FY21, while its BNPL credit service was expanded to 1, 50, 000 outlets in recent times as well.
