On Monday, Noida-based fintech merchant platform Pine Labs revealed it had raised a fresh round of funding from Lone Pine Capital. After this investment, Pine Labs is estimated at more than $2 billion now.
B. Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau said, “Small businesses and customers are rapidly embracing digital commerce and contactless checkout.” In Pay Later services, we are also seeing tremendous uptake and have allowed almost 150,000 outlets for this. It’s time to invest extensively in India and SEA in offline and online commerce. During this thrilling and transformative stage of Pine Labs’ growth journey, we are excited to welcome Lone Pine as an investor.
The investment by Lone Pine follows a strategic investment made by Mastercard in January 2020, when unicorn status was achieved by Pine Labs.
Pine Labs released a merged static QR-based payment solution for its merchants, the Paper POS, in another breakthrough in January 2020.
The Paper POS is an all-in-one solution for acceptance through a single QR of several types of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Bharat QR payments.
Pine Labs and Mastercard jointly revealed earlier in December that they would extend their integrated “pay later” solution early next year to five South-East Asian markets.
A strategic investment was made in Fave in July 2020 by the unicorn. Together, the companies now provide over 50,000 merchants across Malaysia, Singapore and other South-East Asian countries with cashless payment solutions.
Presently, in 3,700 cities across Asia and the Middle East, Pine Labs serves more than 150,000 merchants.
“Mala Gaonkar, Lone Pine’s Portfolio Manager and Managing Director, said, “The Pine Labs team is leveraging key systemic changes taking place globally through payments and fintech, including the convergence of point-of-sale apps and payments, the digitization of small-to-medium businesses, and the rapid adoption of buy-now-pay-later deals. We’re looking forward to the journey ahead.’
Point of sale (PoS) service provider Pine Labs launched in 1998 and 2020, the PoS service platform is now unicorn in 21 years.
The business grew from becoming a player in retail solutions for petroleum automation to being a merchant payment goods and services firm. In India and other Asian nations, it has over 150,000 merchants. Over 350,000 PoS terminals in India power the Pine Labs network.
