By
Bena Ilyas
April 19th, 2024
Pine Labs offers services to banks and merchants via a monthly fee and gets a micro fee on every transaction.
The India and Southeast Asian-dedicated payment fintech platform Pine Labs Pvt has announced that it generated to the tune of close to $600 million in its fundraising round. The report has it that the round was led by global investors: Fidelity Management & Research Company and BlackRock.
The Singapore-based startup, which offers in-store and online payments and prepaid loyalty and “pay later” programs, valued at $3 billion, currently enjoys the support of Sequoia Capital, Actis, Temasek Holdings, PayPal, and Mastercard, among other global investors.
The payment platform also offers services to banks and merchants via a monthly fee and gets a micro fee on every transaction. The adoption of payment services has benefitted companies like Pine Labs.
Per a report, the fintech startup announced the completion of a funding phase which ended with $285 million generated from cross investors and expressed to expand the scale of its merchant commerce and online payments product stack.
According to the CEO of Pine Labs, B Amrish Rau, “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.”
He added that “a growing number of merchants in Asia want to create faster and more interesting checkout experiences. They want solutions that help them compete with large online companies.”
Regarding its growth, a report has attributed it to its transformation from a single product company that allowed retail acceptance of payments to a broader payments platform. “Now, the company can serve thousands of merchants for payment acceptance on cards and UPI processing tens of billions of payment volumes,” the report says.
It is worth noting that the startup offers a prepaid gifting platform called QwikCilver in India, Southeast Asia, Middle East, Europe, and Australia. It is the market-leading prepaid platform in those regions.
The firm’s CEO also highlighted the fact that the Fintech industry is growing rapidly on the Asian continent. According to him “India’s fintech industry is growing at about 50% annual rate and Southeast Asia is following closely behind,” which has propelled the growth of Pine Labs as the firm “is growing at about a 60% annual clip as stores expand their payment options.”
Already, the platform also has a customer base that spans top multinational companies like “Apple, Starbucks Corp, and McDonald’s Corp.”