Pine Labs, which is a merchant platform and a point-of-sale device company, has been reported to have raised almost 285 million USD in a recent round of funding, having investments from groups such as Baron Capital Group, Marshall Wace, Duro Capital, Ward Ferry Management and Moore Strategic Ventures. Already existing investors like Lone Pine Capital, Temasek, and Sunley House Capital were also seen to have participated in this round of funding.
According to reports, it has been said that Pine Labs have mentioned that they will utilize the fresh funding to enhance their merchant commerce and online payment product stack. In Malaysia, the company has been seen to have launched its “buy now, pay later” proposition. The company is also planning on expanding its payment solutions to newer markets in Southeast Asia.
Pine Labs have also allowed secondary transactions for its employees, founder, and early shareholders. Although the company has not revealed the money valuation of the company, sources suggest that the estimates are about 3-3.2 billion USD.
It is reported that Pine Labs has now become the third most valued fintech company, following only Paytm and PhonePe. Razor pay had raised about 160 million USD in the previous month at a valuation of about 3 billion USD. BharatPe also looks all set to enter the 3 billion valuation club after its upcoming round of funding.
The key investors of the company are Actis Capital, Sequoia India, Temasek, PayPal, Lone Pine Capital, and Mastercard. The company has its presence across the globe, serving 1,50,000 merchants in over 3,700 cities all across Asia and the Middle East, covering small, mid-sized, and large merchants across two regions. The company provides a wide range of merchant commerce solutions which include enterprise automation systems and customer relationship management and payment acceptance.
It is reported that with the acquisition of Fave, Pine Labs is all set on launching the former’s payment app in India, with which they will be able to offer its consumers to make transactions at about 5 lakh retail points and merchants which are powered by Pine Labs.
A little about the history of Pine Labs
The journey began in the year 2009 when the company decided to venture into mainstream payment space so to provide solutions to merchants so that they can connect banks and other financial services. They knew that merchants were looking for solutions with which they could enhance their engagement with the customers at the time of payment. Hence, the company decided to partner with partner aggregators and banks and made sure that their PoS terminal was able to process all types of digital payments.
The Fintech company has its headquarters in Noida, India, and was founded in the year 1998 by Lokvir Kapoor, Rajul Garg, and Tarun Upadhyay. The CEO of the company is Amrish Rau.
The company provides a platform to merchants by which they can increase revenue while reducing risks, costs, and complexities at the same time. With this, Pine Labs focuses mainly on the needs of merchants, strategies for revenue generation, last-mile retail transaction technologies, experiences of their customers, and data analysis. Pine Labs plans to provide such a platform to the merchants which is a perfect blend of financial solutions and technology.
It is reported that Pine Labs is used by more than 1,00,000 merchants in India and various other Asian countries, all of them coming from a whole lot of diversified sectors.
Initially, their main focus was on smart, large-scale, card-based payment and solutions for the retail petroleum industry. However, it was in 2009 that the company ventured to connect banks and financial services to provide better solutions to merchants.
By the year 2012, the company had completely redefined its payment technology offerings and had launched a new, smart, unified point-of-sale platform which is cloud-based, created so to reduce costs and generate revenue for retailers. The alliance that the company had with top brands and banks was something that gave the company the power to provide multiple services to the various merchants with their platform.
With this, the company has evolved into a platform for merchants that includes solutions that revolve around payments, multi-channel analytics, risk assessment, merchant lending and insurance, cashback, brand offers, integrated billing, and many more.
By the year 2017, Pine Labs expanded its horizons in the international market when it entered Malaysia through an exclusive partnership with CIMB Bank.
What is Pine Labs currently up to?
It is reported that Pine Labs is currently working for an IPO by March 2022. In July 2020, we saw that Pine Labs appointed its first former data India MD, Nitish Asthana as the COO of the company. In November 2020, we saw that Gokul Rajaram, who was a senior executive at Facebook, joined Pine Labs as an advisor. In December 2020, Pine Labs started working with Mastercard to offer a range of cards and real-time payments.
The products and services that Pine Labs provides
Pine Labs offers mobile point of sale solutions that help merchants to accept credit and debit card payments. Some of the offerings by Pine Labs are Dynamic Currency Conversion, Instant EMI, PaybyPoints, Cashback Programs, Instant Discounts, Loyalty Solutions, Targeted Promotions, E-wallet, and Gift Solution.
The company allows merchants of all sizes, coming from different sectors to thrive on the ever-changing global market. The company allows the merchants to be able to sell more, grow and build with better efficiency by combining technology with domain expertise.
