The unified payments interface (UPI) based payments app, PhonePe has received $38.7 million (Rs 254.43 crore) from its parent company Flipkart via its Singapore-based group company Flipkart Payments Pvt. Ltd., reports VCCircle. This investment in PhonePe was made on August 31, 2017, by allocating 1.76 million shares at Rs 1,445.29 per share to Flipkart Payments Pvt. Ltd. This is the third tranche of funds injected in PhonePe, since it was acquired by Flipkart in April 2016. The earlier ones were: October 2016: Rs 83.68 crore by allocating 4.18 million shares at Rs 200 per share. April 2016: Rs 102.94 crore via allocation of 5.42 million shares at Rs 190 per share. Sameer Nigam, PhonePe's CEO, told ET that the funds will be utilised to add new members to the team and to increase marketing initiatives. He claimed that in August 2017, 45% of all UPI transactions happened on PhonePe. PhonePe had launched an UPI-based Android app in partnership with Yes Bank, back in August last year, and by October had crossed 500,000 registered users. In May 2017, the company claimed to have processed 5.5 million transactions, of which UPI transactions accounted for 3.5 million or 70% of PhonePe’s overall transactions. Currently, PhonePe allows customers of 50 banks to pay via the app. It recently entered the offline commerce space and has added over 25,000 merchants. The company claims that it controls 80% of merchant transactions on the UPI. It has also partnered with payment aggregators like Pine Labs and Commdel and is currently in the process of on-boarding more merchants via the aggregators. PhonePe…
