Mumbai: Pine Labs, a digital retail payments platform backed by Sequoia Capital and Actis, on Thursday announced that Singapore’s Temasek Holdings Pvt. Ltd and digital payments company PayPal Holdings Inc. have acquired minority stakes in the company, investing a total of $125 million.
Pine Labs offers a cloud-based point-of-sale (PoS) payments solutions, allowing merchants to accept credit or debit card payments, as well as latest methods such as e-wallets, QR code payment solutions and unified payments interface (UPI)-based solutions.
The investment from Temasek and PayPal follows a $82 million investment round in March by UK-based Actis and Altimeter Capital. Mint had reported on 6 May that Temasek was in talks to invest in Pine Labs.
“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.
Pine Labs is a leader in the offline payments space, a position that is critical in enabling the ecosystem of online payment products, he said. “The investments will help us move a step closer to our vision for building a world-class merchant-centric payments ecosystem,” said Kapoor.
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, said Pine Labs in a statement.
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 make them an invaluable ally, the statement added.
Pine Labs claims it processes transactions worth $15 billion (annualized) on a base of 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,” said Vicky Bindra, chief executive of Pine Labs.
Pine Labs is used by over 65,000 merchants across India’s retail, e-commerce, electronics, food and beverage, fashion, financial, pharmacy, telecom and airlines industries. The company aims to reach 1 million payment acceptance points in India in the next three to five years.
Sequoia India, which first invested in Pine Labs in 2009, remains the company’s largest shareholder.