Hardeep Singh
Pine Labs IPO is almost here
Pine Labs, founded in 1998, is an Indian merchant platform business that specialises in finance and last-mile retail transaction technologies. It is a unicorn company, with a market capitalization of more than $1 billion. It creates software for point-of-sale (PoS) equipment and provides a merchant platform.
The company operates over 70,000 stores in India, including prominent retailers like Marks & Spencer Retail, Pantaloons, Shoppers Stop, and Westside. It has operations in India, Malaysia, and other Asian countries.
LonePine, PayPal, Temasek, Actis Capital, Altimeter Capital, Sofina, and Sequoia Capital are among its investors.
Pine Lab’s Journey
From a petroleum automation retail solutions provider to a payments products and services provider for merchants, the company has grown. In India and other Asian nations, it has over 100,000 traders. In India, the Pine Labs technology powers approximately 350,000 PoS terminals. Pine Labs entered the mainstream payments and banking services for retailers in 2004.
In March 2019, the business paid $110 million acquiring the gifting startup Qwikcilver. The company partnered with RAKBANK to develop a payment platform in the UAE in February 2019. Google Pay partnered with Pine Labs in March 2018 to take on the offline payments market in India. In January 2019, the company partnered with UnionPay.
Pine Labs paid $45 million in April 2021 for Southeast Asian deals and cash-back platform Fave. Joel Neoh, Yeoh Chen Chow, and Arzumy MD, Fave’s co-founders, will stay on to help the firm develop across Southeast Asia and India.
Pine Lab’s Funding
- Actis Capital, a private equity fund, and Altimeter Capital, a California-based investment group, helped the company finance $82 million (530 crores) in March 2018.
- It also received funding from Sofina in 2015 and Sequoia Capital in 2009. It has raised a total of $208 million as of May 2018.
- CNBC TV18 named the company among the top 10 most-funded companies in India in May 2019.
- The company announced in January 2020 that it had raised an undisclosed sum from Mastercard.
- Pine Labs received $75-$100 million in December 2020, headed by US-based billionaire Stephen Mandel’s hedge firm Lone Pine Capital. Pine Labs’ valuation grew to more than US$2 billion as a result of this financing.
Pine Labs raises $600 million
Pine Labs, a merchant payment solutions business, has raised $600 million (Rs 4,459 crore) in a fundraising round with the goal of going public in 18 months (by 2022). Amrish Rau, the business’s CEO, revealed that the company is valued at $3 billion.
Fidelity Management & Research Co and BlackRock Inc led the round, with Neuberger Berman Investment Advisers LLC, IIFL Asset Management Company (AMC), and Kotak also participating. Kotak’s investment is subjected to clearance from market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India, while IIFL AMC’s investment is made through its late-stage tech fund (SEBI).
Pine Labs is a merchant payment system that allows businesses to accept online and offline digital retail transactions. It was created in 1998 by Lokvir Kapoor. According to the company’s previous press release, it serves over 140,000 merchants and 3.5 lakh point-of-sale (PoS) terminals in 3,700 cities and towns across India and Malaysia.
Apple, Starbucks Corp., and McDonald’s Corp. are among its clients. Amrish Rau is presently the company’s CEO. Throughout Asia and the Middle East, the company serves renowned major, mid-sized, and small retailers.
Pine Labs’ cloud-based platform allows it to provide a variety of payment acceptance and merchant commerce solutions, as well as corporate automation tools including inventory management and customer relationship management. Pine Labs also offers a stored value platform that allows retailers to create, produce, and send digital gift cards to corporate clients all over the world.
With this purchase, Pine Labs aimed to create a consumer-centric sector for discounts and discovery in India and Southeast Asia. The Fave app is now available to over 6 million customers across 40,000 merchant locations, according to the company’s recent news release.
“Pine Labs has made considerable headway in India’s offline-to-online approach and its direct-to-consumer push in Southeast Asia over the last year. “Over the last year, our full-stack strategy to payments and merchant transactions has enabled us to nearly double our in-month merchant joint ventures,” Rau said in the release.
Rau also highlighted Pine Labs’ IPO plans, which would most likely take place in the United States, in an interview with Bloomberg. “Because of our size and scope, we would like to make it a worldwide IPO,” says the company. As we approach our IPO in the next 18 months, we have a solid, Ebitda-positive [earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation] story,” he added.
Sequoia Capital, Temasek Holdings, Actis, PayPal, and Mastercard are among the investors in Pine Labs, which has raised approximately $1.2 billion to date. Pine Labs has raised four rounds of investment in the previous 18 months, and it’s worth has quadrupled in that time.
Do also read our complete story on Pine Labs. What do you think about Pine Labs IPO? Tell us your thoughts in the comments. Do you think its valuation will go high again?
