Naspers-owned PayU to buy India's BillDesk for $4.7b

Founded in 2000, BillDesk positions itself as among India’s leading and most established electronic payments services operators with adjacent offerings in customer engagement and credit. It facilitated about $90 billion in payments in the 2021 financial year and claims its app is used more than 100 million times a day.

The company has raised more than $240 million in private funding across five rounds, according to AVCJ Research. The most recent of these came in 2019, with Temasek Holdings and Visa investing $84.4 million. In 2016, General Atlantic took a 20% interest in 2016 for $120 million while Temasek paid $30 million for 5%.

TA Associates acquired a minority stake for an undisclosed sum in 2012. Early backers include Clearstone Venture Advisors, which invested $5 million in 2006 and still counts the company as part of its portfolio. Government-controlled SIDBI Venture Capital took a 16% stake for $500,000 in 2001 but has since exited its position.

Netherlands-based PayU said its India unit and BillDesk run complementary businesses in the local digital payments space, and that together, they would create a financial ecosystem handling 4 billion transactions a year. This would be equivalent to four times PayU’s current transaction volume in the country.

PayU said the all-cash offer reflected a multi-year track record of strong revenue and profit growth in a digital retail payments market where transaction volume has grown more than 80% in the past two years. It noted in a statement that BillDesk recorded an unaudited profit of about $37 million for the 12 months to March.

This is not the first time PayU has facilitated VC exits in India through strategic acquisition. As early as 2014, it acquired Cobboc, operator of the mobile payments app Eashmart, which was backed by seed investor CIIE. In 2016, PayU paid $130 million for Citrus Pay, a similar business backed by Sequoia Capital, Ascent Capital, and Beenos.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Financials
• Technology
• Exits
• Trade sale
• India
• Naspers
• Temasek Holdings
• General Atlantic
• TA Associates
• Financial Services
• Fintech