Pine Labs raises $150 mn from Alpha Wave ahead of US IPO

Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau.

Merchant payments platform Pine Labs has raised $150 million from New York-based Alpha Wave Global ahead of its $500-million initial public offering (IPO) that will be launched in the United States.

Confirming the development, Amrish Rau, CEO of Pine Labs said in a statement, "We can confirm that Alpha Wave Venture has invested $150 million in Pine Labs. We are happy to bring a marquee investor on board. Our omnichannel strategy is showing strong revenue growth. We are also seeing strong growth in international markets."

While the company did not reveal the valuation at which the round was raised, an ET report said that the valuation is likely to be $5 billion.

In the last six months, Pine Labs has raised $100 million from investment management company Invesco, as well as $20 million from India's largest bank, the State Bank of India (SBI).

Before these interim raises, the company had raised $600 million at a valuation of $3 billion led by Fidelity, Blackrock and other investors in July 2021. 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.

According to a Bloomberg report, the company has done a confidential filing for the IPO within the first half of this year with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Pine Labs has appointed Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs as advisors for its IPO and is eyeing a valuation of anywhere between $5.5 and $7 billion.

In-line with its omnichannel plans, Pine Labs also announced its foray into the online payments space in October 2021 (in addition to physical payments) with a payment gateway platform named Plural.

The company has three key products under the Plural brand -- Plural Gateway, Plural Checkout, and Plural Console. Plural Gateway is a payment gateway that allows payment acceptance via over 100 payment modes and is also equipped to process Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) transactions.

Plural Checkout is a Mobile SDK (Software Development Kit) intended to boost payment gateway performance for Android and iOS users. Plural Console is a Payment Orchestration Platform (POP) that offers a single tech framework to trigger transactions via multiple payment gateways.

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.