Economic Times

BENGALURU: Point-of-sales (PoS) deploying company Pine Labs has raised $125 million from Temasek, a global investment company, and PayPal, the largest digital payments company in the US.

“A large chunk of this deal is secondary in nature since Sequoia India is reducing stake in the company and is getting a partial exit through this deal,” said Lokvir Kapoor, founder of Pine Labs.

“They still remain the company’s largest shareholder.”

Kapoor said that with the support of an investor like Temasek, the company will be able to expand its operations beyond India into the South East Asian markets which has been a longstanding target for the country’s largest offline payment entity. “Further, with this investment PayPal becomes one of our strategic investors which will help us improve our technology stack and expand our scope of offerings to merchants as well as consumers,” said Kapoor.

This round comes on the back of a previous round that Pine Labs had announced in March this year when it had raised $82 million from private equity fund Actis and Californiabased investment company Altimeter Capital.

“We are ahead in this journey in India with an annualised gross transaction value of $15 billion on a base of approximately 300,000 payments acceptance points,” said Vicky Bindra, chief executive of Pine Labs.

“Pine is also on track to originate over $1 billion of instant loans at point-of-sale terminals for card issuers and partner NBFCs this fiscal year.”

This deal holds significance for the Indian payments scene across both forms, for one it shows global interest in the Indian payments scene and secondly it also shows the potential of the card payment industry in the country.