Fintech firms PhonePe and PineLabs get fresh funding from parent companies

Fintech companies PhonePe and PineLabs have received fresh funding from their parent companies. Digital payments firm PhonePe has received Rs 697.9 crore from its parent entity in Singapore called PhonePe Pvt Ltd (Singapore), previously known as Flipkart Payments Pvt Ltd.

The funding would help the company to tap India’s booming digital payments market and compete with Alibaba-backed Paytm, Google’s mobile payment service Google Pay and Amazon Pay.

PhonePe issued 2,022,946 equity shares of face value of Rs 10 and premium of Rs 3,440 each to PhonePe Singapore, according to the regulatory documents filed by the company, which were sourced by business intelligence platform Paper.vc.

With over 150 million users, the company said PhonePe app drives the highest number of merchant unified payments interface (UPI) transactions in India. It is accepted across 5 million merchant outlets nationally. PhonePe also launched its own Apps platform in 2018. Today its customers can place orders on ride hailing firm Ola, Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation, bus ticketing platform redBus and hotel network OYO directly from within the PhonePe Mobile App.

In another development, digital retail payments company Pine Labs has raised about Rs 707 crore through a rights issue to its Singapore-based parent entity, Pine Labs Pte. Ltd. The issue was brought at Rs 300 per share that values the company at approximately Rs 3,497 crore, or approximately $500 million, according to the financial data accessed by business intelligence platform, Tofler.

Pine Labs, which is backed by top investors such as Sequoia, PayPal, Temasek and Sofina, had earlier said it is gearing up for the next phase of its journey. It is planning to bring in the latest solutions that aim at providing better customer experience, foray into new markets and categories, and eventually go for an initial public offering (IPO) which may happen over the next two years. In the next couple of years, the firm is also expecting the total payment volume (TPV) on its transactions to rise more than four-fold to $100 billion from $23 billion.

In June this year, online retailer Amazon invested Rs 450 crore in its digital payments arm Amazon Pay (India).

All these companies are eyeing the Indian digital payments space which is expected to rise fivefold to reach $1 trillion by 2023 and it would be led by the growth in mobile payments, according to a report by financial services company Credit Suisse.