Pine Labs Private Limited, the company that owns the digital retail payments solution provider Pine Labs has raised $125 million (Rs 843 crore) from Temasek of Singapore and internationally renowned payment gateway PayPal.
While Temasek is Singapore’s state-owned investment firm, PayPal’s investment has come from the company PayPal Holdings Inc. Pine Labs plans to use the funds to expand its footprint and bring in improvements in the offerings at different levels.
This funding also marks the entry of Pine Labs into the much-touted Unicorn list of Indian startups, whose valuations have crossed $1 billion. Pine Labs’ last valuation stood at $900 million when Actis Capital and a few other investors pumped in $83 million (Rs 530 crore). Though these investments have come in from different sources, the major investor in the company remains Sequoia Capital, though there have been rumors in the media about Sequoia wanting to opt out.
Pine Labs is one of the oldest firms to have embraced technology in the digital payments space and has been in business since 1998. The company has managed to deploy around 300,000 POS terminals across the country to facilitate payments by customers through credit/debit cards and according to them 450 million transactions get handled by them in a year through these terminals.
Valued at around $15 billion, Pine Labs believes it has 15% of the share of the overall digital payments in India. It has kept itself updated with the addition newer technologies and today, is capable of processing payments through QR code scanning, e-wallets and through the UPI payment route as well for mobile payments, apart from the traditional payment methods. It has developed an effective cloud-based platform to operate its business.
Besides these, the company has introduced e-gift cards and card loyalty programs with accumulated points on usage and encashing them through various freebies later. Pine Labs has, in addition launched a merchant lending business in collaboration with some NBFCs.