Temasek, PayPal invest $125m in India’s Pine Labs

The new funding will be used to accelerate Pine Labs’ expansion target of one million payment acceptance points across India within the next five years, according to a statement. Temasek is expected to help with this goal through its network in India and Asia and its experience with financial services companies, while PayPal can assist as Pine Labs develops its technology.

Pine Labs’ cloud-based payments platform allows merchants to accept a wide range of payment methods including credit and debit cards, online wallets, QR codes, electronic gift cards and more. It claims to have 300,000 payment terminals in operation by 65,000 merchants, and to process 15% of cashless transactions in India’s physical retail space.

The investment by PayPal and Temasek follows an $82 million round earlier this year led by Actis, with participation by Altimeter Capital, a technology-focused PE firm based in the US. Madison invested an undisclosed amount in Pine Labs last year, while Sequoia has backed the company since 2009.

India has seen a surge of investments in technology-enabled payment solutions over the last year, driven by government policies meant to push more Indians into the banking system. These include the demonetization initiative in late 2016; the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a mobile payments platform launched by the National Payments Corporation of India; and biometric payment system Aadhar.

Pine Labs’ competitors in the mobile payments space include Mobikwik, a domestic mobile wallet developer, and mobile point-of-service developer Mswipe.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Technology
• Financials
• Expansion
• India
• TMT
• Financial Services
• Growth capital