Singapore’s Temasek and digital payments company PayPal Holdings Inc. have picked up minority stakes in digital retail payments platform Pine Labs Pvt. Ltd for $125 million, the company said.
Pine Labs, which also counts Sequoia Capital and Actis as its investors, offers cloud-based point-of-sale payments solutions, which allows merchants to accept credit and debit card payments, besides transactions using e-wallets, QR code and unified payments interface (UPI).
The investment from Temasek and PayPal follows a $82 million round in March by UK-based Actis and Altimeter Capital. On 6 May, Mint had also reported that Temasek was in talks to invest in Pine Labs.
“We are teaming up with Temasek and PayPal at a time when the Indian payments market is at an inflexion point,” said Pine Labs founder Lokvir Kapoor.
According to Kapoor, Pine Labs is a leader in the offline payments space—a position that is critical in enabling the ecosystem of online payment products. “The investments will help us move a step closer to our vision for building a world-class merchant-centric payments ecosystem.”
Temasek, with its deep network in several Asian markets and extensive knowledge of financial services companies, is a great partner for Pine Labs as it ramps up its regional expansion, Pine Labs said in the statement.
With the company expanding its product suite, building new layers of services for merchants, banks and other communities in the payment ecosystem, PayPal’s global presence and strong product expertise makes them an invaluable ally, it added.
Pine Labs processes transactions worth $15 billion (annualized) on a base of 300,000 payments acceptance points. “This positions us as a critical and strategically important player in the offline-online convergence in India. Pine is also on track to originate over $1 billion of instant loans at point-of-sale terminals for card issuers and partner non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) this fiscal year, demonstrating the power and utility of our payments platform,” said Pine Labs CEO Vicky Bindra.
The services of Pine Labs is used by over 65,000 merchants across India’s retail, e-commerce, electronics, food and beverage, fashion, financial, pharmacy, telecom and airlines industries. The company aims to reach one million payment acceptance points in India over the next three to five years.
Sequoia India, which had first invested in Pine Labs in 2009, remains the company’s largest shareholder.
Source: Mint