Pine Labs and PharmEasy parent hit with valuation markdown by Neuberger Berman

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Pine Labs and PharmEasy parent API Holdings have become the latest Indian unicorns to see their values getting slashed by investors internally, as valuations of technology companies have slumped across the globe amid macroeconomic headwinds.

US-based Neuberger Berman has reduced the fair values of API Holdings and Pine Labs by 21.6 percent and 39 percent, respectively, to $4.39 billion and $3.14 billion, the investor's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed.

PharmEasy, an online medicine delivery platform, was last valued at $5.6 billion after it attempted to go public in 2021 but later withdrew its proposal. Pine Labs, a point-of-sale and payments solution provider, on the other hand, was last valued at $5 billion and counts Sequoia Capital and Mastercard among others as its backers.

PharmEasy and Pine Labs did not immediately comment on the story.

Neuberger Berman is also an investor in Gupshup, a cloud-based chatbot development platform, and it has not reduced its valuation, the filings showed.

Pine Labs and PharmEasy have joined a growing list of unicorns that are being marked down by investors, shining a spotlight on the valuations of technology companies in India and elsewhere.

Biggest unicorns and decacorns (startups valued at $10 billion and above) including Byju's, Swiggy, and Ola, among others have faced internal markdowns by investors such as Blackrock, Invesco, and Vanguard over the last few months. In September last year, hotel aggregator Oyo was marked down internally by SoftBank, its biggest investor. The company's valuation was slashed to $2.7 billion from close to $10 billion.

Rising interest rates, coupled with geopolitical risks, have made investors pessimistic across the globe. As a result, most have significantly reduced their private market investments.

Earlier this week, Moneycontrol reported that SoftBank, Sequoia Capital, and Tiger Global Management, three of the country's most aggressive startup investors, have participated in only 11 deals in 2023 so far, compared to nearly 60 deals in the same period of the previous year.

SoftBank, in fact, has not invested in a single deal so far in India this year as the company slashed total investments by more than 90 percent between April 2022 and March 2023 compared to a year earlier.