Pine Labs, India’s largest digital retail payments platform, today announced that
Temasek, a global investment company headquartered in Singapore, and
PayPal Holdings Inc., a global technology platform and digital payments leader, have acquired minority stakes in the company for a combined $125 million USD.
“We’re teaming up with Temasek and PayPal at a time when the Indian payments market is at an inflexion point,” said Lokvir Kapoor, Founder of Pine Labs. “We are a leader in the offline payments space, a position that is critical in enabling the ecosystem of online payment products. The investments will help us move a step closer to our vision for building a world-class merchant-centric payments ecosystem.”
Temasek, with its deep network in many Asian markets and extensive knowledge of financial services companies, is a great partner for Pine Labs as it ramps up its regional expansion. And with the company expanding its product suite, building new layers of services for merchants, banks and other communities in the payment ecosystem, PayPal’s global presence and strong product expertise makes them an invaluable ally.
“We believe it is possible to achieve India’s cashless vision by digitizing the payments acceptance infrastructure,” said Vicky Bindra, CEO of Pine Labs. “We are furthest ahead in this journey in India with an annualized GTV of $15 billion USD on a base of approximately 300,000 payments acceptance points. This positions us as a critical and strategically important player in the offline-online convergence in India. Pine is also on track to originate over $1 billion USD of instant loans at point-of-sale terminals for card issuers and partner NBFCs this fiscal year, demonstrating the power and utility of our payments platform. The investments from Temasek and PayPal will help accelerate Pine’s growth.”
Sequoia India, which first invested in Pine Labs in 2009, remains the company’s largest shareholder.
“We are thrilled to welcome Temasek and PayPal to the company,” said Shailendra Singh, Managing Director of Sequoia Capital (India) Singapore. In the last year, Pine Labs has added four valuable equity partners, including Actis and Altimeter, who have significant expertise in the global payments industry. This is a huge endorsement of the team’s accomplishments, and provides the company a significant strategic advantage. We value our long-term partnership with Pine Lab’s leadership team, and are excited about the next phase of growth and evolution.”
About Pine Labs
Pine Labs has reimagined point-of-sale payments in India, replacing the standard card-centric point-of-sale terminal with a smart, cloud-based payments platform that reduces costs and enhances retailer’s revenues. Pine’s software can be integrated with a generic point of sale terminal, allowing merchants to accept traditional electronic payment methods such as credit or debit card issued by any bank, as well as new generation methods such as e-wallets, QR code payment solutions or other UPI based solutions, on a single platform.
- The company currently processes 450 million transactions worth over US$15 billion, on an annualized basis.
- Integrates India’s top 12 credit and debit card issuing banks, and the top 14 merchant-acquirers, on its payment platform.
- Is used by over 65,000 merchants across India’s retail, e-commerce, electronics, food and beverage, fashion, financial, pharmacy, telecom and airlines industries.
- Handles approximately 15% of India’s cashless transactions in physical retail stores, and is currently deployed at approximately 300,000 payment acceptance terminals.
- Aims to reach 1 million payment acceptance points in India in the next three to five years.