Pine Labs raises $125 mln from Temasek, PayPal

The country’s largest digital retail payments platform, Pine Labs, has raised $125 million from Singapore-based investment firm Temasek and global digital payments firm PayPal Holdings in return for a minority stake.

“We’re teaming up with Temasek and PayPal at a time when the Indian payments market is at an inflexion point,” Lokvir Kapoor, founder of Pine Labs, said in a statement on Thursday. “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 expected to help Pine Labs as it ramps up its regional expansion.

Pine Labs will leverage PayPal’s global presence and product expertise as it looks to expand its product suite, building new layers of services for merchants, banks and other communities in the payment ecosystem.

“We believe it is possible to achieve India’s cashless vision by digitising the payments acceptance infrastructure,” said Vicky Bindra, chief executive of Pine Labs.

He added that Pine had an annualised gross transaction value (GTV) of $15 billion in India 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 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.”

Sequoia India, which first invested in Pine Labs in 2009, remains the company’s largest shareholder. In March this year, Pine Labs, which offers cloud-based digital point-of-sale solutions to merchants, raised $82 million from Actis Capital and Altimeter Capital, in a transaction that valued the company at nearly $800 million.

Pine Labs also has presence in Malaysia. It is now looking to expand to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam.

For Temasek, which has invested over $10 billion in India since 2004, investments in financial services are not new. Its other investments in the space include BillDesk, which offers online payment gateway solutions, and Policy Bazaar, an online insurance aggregation platform.