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The Noida-based startup was the first to reach a $1 billion in valuation in 2020, marking its entry into India’s unicorn club in January when it raised strategic investment from card network behemoth Mastercard
 
Home-grown payments solution provider Pine Labs, on Monday, announced that it has raised close to $100 million from Lone Pine Capital as part of secondary and primary share sale. This investment round has taken the company's valuation from $1.6 billion to $2 billion within a year.
 
The Noida-based startup was the first to reach a $1 billion in valuation in 2020, marking its entry into India’s unicorn club in January when it raised strategic investment from card network behemoth Mastercard.
 
With this, Pine Labs becomes the third most-valued fintech in the Indian startup ecosystem after Paytm-parent One97 Communications Ltd, valued at $16 billion, and Bengaluru-based PhonePe, which was assigned a valuation of $5.5 billion after the recent Flipkart hive-off.
 
“We are thrilled to welcome Lone Pine as an investor during this exciting and transformative phase of Pine Labs’ growth journey. Small businesses and consumers are fast adapting to digital commerce and contactless checkout. We are also seeing tremendous uptake in Pay Later services and have now enabled nearly 150,000 outlets for this. It’s time to invest heavily in offline and online commerce across India and SEA," said B. Amrish Rau, CEO, Pine Labs.
 
Recently, Mint first reported that Pine Labs was entering Southeast Asian markets, with its ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ credit offering through a partnership with investor Mastercard. The offering is to be opened in Thailand and the Philippines by February 2021 and, subsequently, in Vietnam, Singapore and Indonesia.
 
 Pine Labs had already rolled out its ‘Pay Later’ solution in Malaysia with Mastercard, earlier this year.
 
“The Pine Labs team is leveraging key structural changes taking place across payments and fintech globally, including the integration of software and payments at the point-of-sale, the digitization of small-to-medium enterprises, and the rapid adoption of buy-now-pay-later offerings. We look forward to the road ahead," said Mala Gaonkar, portfolio manager and managing director at Lone Pine.
 
Currently, Pine Labs serves more than 150,000 merchants in 3,700 cities across Asia and the Middle East.
 
In July 2020, the company made a strategic investment in Singapore and Malaysia-based loyalty payments platform Fave . Together, the companies now provide cashless payment solutions to over 50,000 merchants across Malaysia, Singapore and other Southeast Asian countries.
 
Earlier this month, Mint had also reported that digital payments entity Google Pay was entering into the gift cards space through a partnership with Pine Labs-owned Qwikcilver, as it looks to issue real-time virtual gift cards to users from more than 150 online and offline brands, across 1,500 cities in India.