Pine Labs gets $20 mn investment from SBI ahead of IPO

As Pine Labs gears up for its Initial Public Offering (IPO) this year, the company now has a new investor. State Bank of India (SBI), the country's largest public sector bank, has made a $20-million investment in the merchant platform company, Pine Labs said on January 4.

Commenting on the fundraise, B Amrish Rau, CEO of Pine Labs, said “In the last one year, several marquee investors have placed their trust in our business model and growth momentum and that is a gratifying feeling. This association with SBI is a personally satisfying experience as I had started my career selling financial services technology to SBI.”

In 2021, Pine Labs raked in a total of $700 million across two rounds of fundraising. The first $600 million was raised in July 2021 at a valuation of $3 billion led by Fidelity, Blackrock and other investors.

In September 2021, the company announced it has raised $100 million more from US-based investment management company Invesco. The investment was done through the Invesco Developing Markets Fund.

The company, which provides merchant payment, PoS, and Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) solutions, is also backed by Sequoia Capital, Temasek Holdings, Actis, PayPal, and Mastercard amongst other global investors.

Pine Labs is working on expanding its BNPL business across India and Southeast Asia and entered the consumer payment space with its April 2021 acquisition of Fave.

In October last year, Pine Labs forayed into the online payments space with a payment gateway platform named Plural.

Plural is expected to make the offline-to-online transition easier for Pine Labs’ merchant base and is aimed towards merchants and enterprises looking to set up afresh or augment their existing online commerce business.

SBI's last investment in a fintech company was in digital payments platform Cashfree in June 2021.

The public sector bank's investment comes ahead of Pine Labs' planned IPO, for which the company is reported to have appointed Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs as advisors. It is eyeing a valuation of $6 billion through the IPO.

In an interview with Moneycontrol in April 2021, Rau had revealed that Pine Labs had been in touch with law firms, auditors, and bankers for a year, but has not yet decided on when it will list.

Founded in 1998, Pine Labs processes payments worth $30 million in a year. It serves over 150,000 merchants in 3,700 cities across Asia and the Middle East. It has also enabled its BNPL credit service to 150,000 outlets.