Pine Labs, the merchant payments solution provider, has raised $600 million in the latest funding event. Payments’ firm CEO Amrish Rau revealed the funding news to media portals. Now, Pine Lab’s valuation has reached a whopping $3 billion. The fintech firm is planning to go public in 2022.
Pine Labs Raises $600 Million
Investors are pouring a lot of funds into the fintech sector. In the latest development, Pine Labs has closed a $600 million(Rs 4459 crore) funding round. The startup plans to start its IPO within 18 months. Pine Labs CEO confirmed the above details.
The current financing round was co-led by Fidelity Management & Research Co and BlackRock Inc. Neuberger Berman Investment Advisers LLC, IIFL Asset Management Company (AMC) and Kotak also participated in the concluding funding round.
IIFL AMC is investing through its late-stage tech fund, whereas Kotak’s investment is subject to approval from market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI).
Founded by Lokvir Kapoor, Pine Labs is providing payments solution to merchants since 1998. The firm helps businesses to get online and offline payments from their customers.
As per the earlier statement released by Pine Labs, it has a huge network of 1.4 lakh merchants. And, it has installed over 3.5 lakh point of sale(PoS). Pine Labs has a strong presence in 3,700 cities of India and Malaysia.
Apple, Starbucks, and McDonald are some of the star clients of Pine Labs.
Pine Labs Key Operations and Developments
Pine Labs targeted clients belong to every level of business starting from small retailers to large organizations like Apple across Asia and the Middle East.
Pine Labs not only provides payment solutions but is also helping firms in automating their business activities including inventory and customer relationship management.
To its valued customers, Pine Labs provides digital gift cards occasionally from its automated stored value platform.
The startup also acquired Fave, a Malaysian payment and discovery firm, to strengthen its operations further. With Fave, Pine Labs plans to implement discount and discovery verticals in India. Fave app has a strong subscriber base of 6 million users and 40k merchants, as claimed by Pine Labs.
Rau also talked about the recent growth of Pine Labs. He said, “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% over the last year.”
In an interview with Bloomberg, Rau talked about Pine Labs’ IPO plan. The startup revealed that they have a plan to start Pine Labs IPO in the US. Due to the kind of large operations Pine Labs, it is going global with US listing.
Up to now, Pine Labs has raised over $1.2 billion in different funding events. Sequoia Capital, Temasek Holdings, Actis, PayPal and Mastercard are the major investors of Pine Labs. The recently concluded round is the fourth financing event held by Pine Labs in the last one and half years and its valuation tripled in the same period.
