IPO-bound Pine Labs raises $600 million from Fidelity and Blackrock, valued at $3 billion

Answer: Pine Labs (Image: Facebook)

Payments firm Pine Labs on July 6 said that it has raised $600 million led by Fidelity, Blackrock and other investors, valuing it at $3 billion, leading up to a public offering in the next 12-18 months.

Other investors include Ishana, Tree Line, a fund advised by Neuberger Berman Investment Advisers, IIFL AMC via its ‘Late-Stage Tech Fund’ and Kotak. 

Founded in 1998, Pine Labs provides solutions to online, in-store and buy-now-pay-later mechanisms. It is one of early backer Sequoia Capital India’s oldest investments, and a lucrative one. 

“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. In addition, 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,” CEO Amrish Rau said.

Pine Labs was valued at $2 billion in December 2020 when it raised money from Lone Pine Capital.

Singapore-based Pine Labs is expected to go public soon, but where it will list is still unclear. The upcoming local IPOs of internet startups such as Zomato, Policybazaar and Paytm could boost the plans of other Indian but foreign-headquartered firms to list locally.

“Pine Labs has rapidly transformed from a single product company allowing retail acceptance of payments to a broader payments platform. The company now serves hundreds of thousands of merchants across payments acceptance on cards and UPI processing tens of billions of payment volumes,” said Shailendra Singh, managing director at Sequoia India.

“Additionally, through its acquisitions of QwikCilver and Fave Pine Labs now has the market-leading prepaid platform in this region as well as the top consumer loyalty product in this market,” he added.