Pine Labs has raised around $100 million in fresh funds from Lone Pine Capital, a hedge fund based in the United States, at a valuation of over US$2 billion, it said in a statement. With this round of funding, the domestic point-of-sale (POS) device player becomes the third most valued fintech in the country after Paytm and PhonePe.
Pine Labs has a network of over 150,000 merchants in 3,700 cities across Asia and the Middle East and processes around $30 billion of payments per year. The company has been partnering with banks and card network companies in recent months to offer new services, particularly loans at POS devices for consumers. “Small businesses and consumers are fast adopting to digital commerce and contactless checkout. We are also seeing tremendous uptake in Pay Later services and have now enabled nearly 150,000 outlets for this. It’s time to invest heavily in offline and online commerce across India and South-East-Asia,” said Amrish Rau, chief executive officer, Pine Labs.
Today we announce a new round led by Lone Pine Capital, founded by the legendary Stephen Mandel. This round values @PineLabs $2Bn+. We are very excited as this adds to our pristine investor set. Thank u @Sequoia_India @Temasek @Mastercard @Paypal @ActisLLP
1/5 pic.twitter.com/Xt5tEqfTPq— Amrish Rau (@amrishrau) December 21, 2020
Earlier in January this year, Pine Labs raised funds from Mastercard which propelled the PoS player to the coveted unicorn status, or startup with a valuation of over $1billion. With its partnership with Mastercard, the company is expanding to the South East Asian market to offer “Buy Now Pay Later’ loan options in offering Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore and Indonesia. Further, in July, the company bought a stake in loyalty payments platform Fave and now provides cashless payment solutions to over 50,000 merchants in Malaysia, Singapore and other countries.
The company’s major investors include Mastercard, Temasek, Sequoia Capital PayPal Ventures, Flipkart and others, according to Crunchbase. “The Pine Labs team is leveraging key structural changes taking place across payments and fintech globally, including the integration of software and payments at the point-of-sale, the digitization of small-to-medium enterprises, and the rapid adoption of buy-now-pay-later offerings. We look forward to the road ahead,” said Mala Gaonkar, portfolio manager and managing director at Lone Pine in a statement.
In FY19, the company’s operating revenues stood at ₹491.63 crore up by 40% from ₹332.25 crore in FY18. It made a loss of ₹13.7 crore in FY19 compared to a loss of ₹11.23 crore in FY18, according to filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.
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