Pine Labs raises $600 million funding from BlackRock, Fidelity

In May this year, Pine Labs completed $285 million funding from new cross-over investors. (Representational Image)

Merchant commerce platform Pine Labs on Tuesday announced the results of an investment round that allowed the company to raise $600 million. The round was led by global investors- Fidelity Management & Research Company and BlackRock. As of now, the company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Actis, Temasek Holdings, PayPal and Mastercard among other global investors.

It is to note that Pine Lab’s software services are used by banks and merchants via monthly fee. From this, the fintech startup also receives a micro fee on every transaction. With the growth in payment services, companies like Pine Labs have been benefiting.

In May this year, Pine Labs said that it has completed $285 million funding from new cross-over investors. The company is also planning to further scale its merchant commerce and online payments product stack.

B Amrish Rau, CEO, Pine Labs said, “Over the last year, Pine Labs has made significant progress in its Offline to Online strategy in India and the direct-to-consumer play in Southeast Asia. Our full-stack approach to payments and merchant commerce has allowed us to grow in-month merchant partnerships by nearly 100% over the last year.”

The transformation of the company has been from a single product company that allowed retail acceptance of payments to a broader payments platform. Now, the company is able to serve thousands of merchants for payment acceptance on cards and UPI processing tens of billions of payment volumes. Shailendra Singh, MD, Sequoia Capital said, “The company also has the market leading PayLater offering with ~$3B in annualized PayLater transactions. Through its acquisitions of QwikCilver and Fave, Pine Labs now has the market leading pre-paid platform in this region as well as the top consumer loyalty product in this market.”

To be sure, the company has been providing services to its merchant partners in India and other SEA markets.

The investment round comes ahead of the company’s preparation for IPO. According to Rau, since the company has a good, Ebitda-positive story, it is planning to go for an IPO in the next 18 months that is likely to take place in the US, Bloomberg reported.