Flipkart has committed $500 million for its payments arm PhonePe. The company added that this was an addition to $75 million funds infusion Flipkart had made in PhonePe since acquiring it in 2015. The investment will be used to scale up the company's technology platforms and expand their merchant network and consumer base rapidly, CEO Sameer Nigam said in a statement. "We have been growing at over 100% every two months this year, and this investment will help us maintain the same aggressive growth rate for the next two years," he added. PhonePe said that it has over 16 million transactions due to Flipkart;s Big Billion Days in September 2017. The company added that its annual run rate, as a result, touched a new high of $ 3.5 billion in terms of Total Payments Volume (TPV) in September. Note that PhonePe also entered the offline commerce space earlier this year now said that it has over 25,000 merchants. It also has a partnership with payments solutions company Pine Labs, through which the company expects to increase PhonePe’s acceptance at 15 more national chains. The company said that it controls 80% of merchant transactions on the unified payments interface (UPI), as indicated by this Business Standard report. Meanwhile, the payments company is adding new features and introduced credit card bill payments earlier this week. Right now, it will only be supporting credit cards which are on the Visa network but Nigam added that other networks such as Mastercard, American Express, and RuPay will be added in…
