Recently, Pine Labs, one of the POS giants, which processes $30 billion of payments annually, raised a fresh $315 million in funding led by new investors Fidelity Management and Research Company and BlackRock as part of its ongoing financial round. With the latest tranche, the company has closed the investment round, taking the total size of the funding to $600 million. The fintech start-up’s valuation stands at $3 billion after the fundraising.
Ishana, Tree Line, Neuberger Berman Investment Advisers, IIFL AMC, and Kotak are the other new investors. IIFL AMC routed its investment via its late-stage tech fund.
Pine Labs represents 14 percent of card spends through a network of 600,000 POS machines and its cloud-based SaaS platform, Plutus, supports payments across different modes, including gift cards, loyalty points, and on credit (EMI) by integrating multiple issuers and acquirer banks on a single platform.
The company that counts Sequoia Capital, Temasek Holdings, PayPal, and Mastercard among its other supporters is racing for a possible US listing in the next 18 months, joining an epidemic of Indian startups that are chalking out plans to go public.
Pine Labs is virtually the only player in gift card management in India with more than 95 percent market share. It has also become a dominant player in offline POS consumer durable financing with a 90 percent market share outside of Bajaj Finance, wherein it offers EMIs in tie-up with 120+ brands, 35+ lenders, and 150,000 merchants for fees. It enables its banking partners to offer no-interest EMIs to not just credit card users but also debit card customers. Its buy now pays later (BNPL) has scaled to disburse $2 billion of consumer loans (no-interest EMIs) in FY20 with ATS of `25,000 in India and plans to expand the offering to five Southeast Asian markets in 2021.
“Over the last year, Pine Labs has made significant progress in its Offline to Online strategy in India and the direct-to-consumer play in Southeast Asia. Our full-stack approach to payments and merchant commerce has allowed us to grow in-month merchant partnerships by nearly 100 percent over the last year. The size of the Indian fintech market stood at an estimated `1.9 trillion as of 2019 and the segment is projected to grow at a 22.7 percent CAGR during 2020-25. India and China accounted for the highest fintech adoption rate in the world’s emerging markets as of March 2020. India had an adoption rate of 87 percent against the global average of 64 percent,” said, CEO B Amrish Rau.