UPI-based digital payments major Phone Pe is now said to be on the verge of making an acquisition of its own in the related space. As per a VCCircle report, the target company is Zopper, which is mainly into developing software for point of sale PoS devices on a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform.
Phone Pe is the digital payments vertical acquired being nurtured by the promoters Sachin and Binny Bansal and is an entity independent from Flipkart.
Those in the know of the development indicate that a formal announcement on this could come through within a week’s time. Incidentally, the two promoters of Flipkart had made some investments in Zopper’s parent company, Solvy Tech Solutions, way back in 2012.
Interestingly as well, Zopper has made changes in its basic business profile and that too twice over. Starting out as a review site in 2010, it went into the ecommerce business on a hyper-local level before switching to the SaaS platform, which it continues till today. It has also split its business into 2 divisions, one offering the PoS software and the other servicing the hardware purchased through offline sources.
Zopper has managed to raise funds in the past, around $20 million in all from different entities, Tiger Global, Blume Ventures and Nirvana Ventures, among others. There is no record of fresh funding being sought and raised in the past 3 years or so.
Phone Pe has stiff competition in the form of Google Tez and Paytm. Paytm has the backing of Alaibaba and SoftBank, is also on an aggressive mode, trying to add more services on its platform. They all use the government’s Unified Payment Interface, UPI and vie for the same pie in the digital wallet/payment space.
From the last released performance figures for Zopper for the financial year 2016-17, it appears as if the company has made considerable progress in increasing revenues and cutting down on losses.
Phone Pe on its part keeps getting financial induction from the Singapore registered investment firm of the group, Flipkart Payments Pvt. Ltd