[Funding] A Look into Pine Labs' $300 Mn Fundraise and $3.5 Bn valuation ahead of IPO

Payments and merchant commerce startup Pine Labs has raised $315 million. New investors include Fidelity Management, funds managed by BlackRock, Ishana, Tree Line, and Neuberger Berman Investment Advisers. Indian institutional investors IIFL AMC (via its Late-Stage Tech Fund) and Kotak also participated in this investment round. They will join existing investors such as Temasek, Sequoia Capital, Actis, PayPal and Mastercard among others, pending approval from India’s capital markets regulator, SEBI.

The fintech company had last raised $285 million in an earlier round. With today’s announcement, Pine Labs will close the round at $600 million, taking its post-money valuation at nearly $3.5 billion. The round makes Pine Labs one of the highest-valued and most well-capitalised fintech companies in India only behind IPO-bound Paytm and Walmart-backed PhonePe. Reports outline that the company aims to use the funds to expand to offline payment solutions, QR-based solutions and expansion to South Asian Markets.

Pine Labs IPO plans

The company has already started working towards launching an IPO by March 2022 in the US. In March, a ToI report suggested that the PoS provider has begun early-stage discussions with at least four merchant bankers to work on its IPO. It is aiming at a valuation of around $ 5 billion. But these are early estimates and the valuation could change based on how these discussions progress.

About Pine Labs

Pine Labs evolved from a petroleum automation retail solutions player to becoming a payments products and services firm for merchants. It, today, is an Indian merchant platform company that provides financing and last-mile retail transaction technology. It is one of the unicorn companies that makes software for point of sale machines.

Today, 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 Fave. Together, the companies now provide cashless payment solutions to over 50,000 merchants across Malaysia, Singapore and other South-East Asian countries.

Read more: How is PineLabs helping SMEs to adopt digital payments with ease during Covid?