B. Amrish Rau, CEO of Pine Lab
Fintech company Pine Labs has raised funding from American hedge fund Lone Pine Capital, bringing its valuation to over US$2 billion. While terms of the deal remain undisclosed, sources believe it to be close to US$75-100 million.
“We are excited to partner with Pine Labs as they innovate at scale in the payments and merchant commerce space, benefiting consumers, merchants and financial institutions,” said Mala Gaonkar, Portfolio Manager and Managing Director at Lone Pine.
The funding comes in just more than 11 months after the company raised funding from payments giant Mastercard that brought it to unicorn status.
Incorporated in Singapore, the India-based company serves large, mid-sized and small merchants across Asia and the Middle East as a payments platform.
Its technology platform enables offline and online last-mile retail transactions, provides customer insights to merchants for targeted sales and offers risk-managed financial solutions for merchants’ business growth.
Also Read: Fintech firm Pine Labs raises US$125M from Temasek, PayPal for Southeast Asia expansion
After noticing the rise in the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) services trend, Pine Labs decided to expand its integrated BNPL solution to five Southeast Asian (SEA) markets in early 2020 along with Mastercard.
“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 SEA,” commented Pine Labs CEO B. Amrish Rau.
Pine Labs was started in 1998 as an offline retail payment provider, but today serves more than 150,000 merchants in 3,700 cities as a fully digital payment acceptance technology. Its Pay Later platform currently has 35 credit providers such as IDFC Capital First, Zest Money, ICICI Bank among others.
In July 2020, the company made a strategic investment in Fave, together, the companies now provide cashless payment solutions to over 50,000 merchants across Malaysia, Singapore and other Southeast Asian countries.
The company’s key investors include Sequoia India, Mastercard, Actis Capital, Temasek and PayPal.
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Image Credit: Pine Labs
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