Digital payments and financial services decacorn PhonePe has raised another $100 million in a new tranche of its ongoing $1 billion fundraise at a pre-money valuation of $12 billion from General Atlantic and its co-investors, people aware of the matter told Moneycontrol.
In January, PhonePe announced raising $1 billion in tranches at a valuation of $12 billion. Since then, the fintech unicorn has raised $350 million from General Atlantic, $100 million from Tiger Global Management, Ribbit Capital and TVS Capital, and $200 million from its largest shareholder--Walmart.
PhonePe confirmed the development.
Moneycontrol first reported in October about PhonePe eyeing new fundraising from General Atlantic and others at a valuation of $12 billion.
PhonePe’s fundraise follows the company’s spin-off from e-commerce major Flipkart, which was announced in December. The Flipkart spin-off also completes PhonePe's transition to a fully Indian-domiciled company, which began in 2022.
The company, in its previous statements, has said that it plans to deploy these funds to scale up its payments and insurance businesses in India, as well as to launch and aggressively scale new businesses like lending, stockbroking, ONDC (open network for digital commerce)-based shopping, and account aggregators over the next few years.
Earlier this month, it officially launched Pincode, a new consumer-facing application, which will be a part of the ONDC framework to strengthen its e-commerce forays. In an interview with Moneycontrol, the company's co-founder and chief executive Sameer Nigam also said that it has started digital lending pilots for merchants and would soon launch it.
“We are working now (on digital lending) and we are adding more partners there. Demand is insane because you already have merchant relationships for so long, but we don’t want to build books. We don’t want to do manufacturing, even here we are doing merchant lending as partners,” said Nigam.
Founded in 2015 by former Flipkart executives Nigam, Rahul Chari, and Burzin Engineer, the fintech has over 400 million registered users and is the market leader in Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions. In terms of monthly UPI volumes, the company has a 47 percent market share.
In 2017, the company expanded into financial services, allowing customers to buy gold, insurance, and mutual funds on its platform in addition to making bill and utility payments.
In the last year, PhonePe has acquired GigIndia, WealthDesk, OpenQ, and completed the long-awaited acquisition of IndusOS.
PhonePe's fundraise comes at a time when its closest competitor, Paytm, has seen its valuation drop by over 50 percent since it went public in November 2021, prompting public shareholders to question the company's ability to attain company-level profitability. Paytm's total market capitalisation was just over $5.2 billion as of April 12.
