Flipkart’s payments arm PhonePe has received $38 million in a fresh round of funding from its Singapore-based group entity, Flipkart Payments according to filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.
VCCircle reports that the UPI-based payments app raised the money on August 31 through the allocation of 1.76 million equity shares at a subscription price of Rs 1,445.29 apiece.
This is a significant increase given that PhonePe received Rs 83.68 crore in October 2016 by allocating 4.18 million equity shares at Rs 200 apiece and prior to that it had received Rs 102. 94 crore against 5.42 million shares at a subscription price of Rs 190 apiece in April last year.
Flipkart acquired PhonePe, formerly known as FX Mart in April 2016 and Singapore-based umbrella entity Flipkart’s subsidiary Flipkart Payments has a controlling stake in PhonePe.
This infusion of funds into PhonePe comes on the heels of Flipkart receiving a massive funding of $2.5 billion from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. Prior to that, Flipkart raised $1.4 billion from Microsoft, Tencent and eBay, in April when it acquired eBay’s Indian operations.
Reports also suggest that Amazon India is looking to increase its investment in its payments arm Amazon Pay by nearly five times. As per the company’s MCA filings, Amazon has already increased the authorised capital of its Amazon Pay from $61.5 million to $307.7 million over the last few months for expansion of business operations.
Executives at Amazon India told Mint that the investments into the digital payments arm are likely to increase over the next 6-12 months.
At a time when the digital payments market is growing significantly, Phonepe is rapidly scaling its operations with UPI as its competitive edge. Its monthly transactions grew 800% since December 2016, generating an annual payment volume of $2.5 billion in July. In fact, the company claimed to have overtaken Bharat Interface for Mobile (BHIM) app in terms of total transactions with a 45% share in August.
In August, PhonePe told The News Minute that it will continue to add more use cases to the app and go big on offline payments as well, which it rolled out in July. The next big step for PhonePe is offering financial products.