Initial public offering (IPO)-bound payment solutions provider Pine Labs on Tuesday said it has acquired payments startup Qfix Infocomm, for an undisclosed amount.
The deal comes on the backdrop of Pine Labs foraying into the online payments space with the roll out of Plural in October 2021.
Qfix is a cloud-based platform that offers online integrated payments and billing services to a variety of industries. Currently, it houses over 5,000 merchants, including educational institutions, governments and groups.
The Mumbai-based startup today has HDFC bank as its major distribution partner, and it claims to tackle billing and invoice concerns as well as offer workflow management solutions for merchants.
“We are quite upbeat about the potential of this promising platform and impressed with what they have already achieved in a short span of time. As businesses look at ways to improve efficiency, everyday processes between suppliers and customers need an overhaul too.
Qfix’s innovations through their smart invoicing and workflow management and billing tools would help offer a complete merchant payments and commerce platform through Plural,” said Amrish Rau, CEO of Pine Labs.
Qfix was founded in 2015 as an embedded fintech startup focused on enabling industry segment-specific innovative digital payments and commerce experience for merchants, consumers and communities.
The platform is also launching pilot offline-to-online and community marketplace solutions with application programming interface (API) plug-ins, which can be used across multiple merchant segments like educational institutes, residential societies, online ERP players (enterprise resource planning), and clubs as a solution to plug-in and launch their own online stores and marketplaces with shopping cart for a standalone as well as a cluster of merchants.
Rajul Garg launched Pine Labs in 1998 but left the firm in 2003. Lokvir Kapoor, the company's current chairman, then took over the payments company. Before moving to its present business strategy, it concentrated on large-scale smart card-based payments and loyalty solutions for Indian metro enterprises.
In May 2021, the company raised tranche of $285 million from a clutch of reputed public market-focused cross-over funds, bringing its valuation to around $3 billion then. In August 2021, Pine Labs roped in CRED founder Kunal Shah on its board.
In 2021, Pine Labs raised a total of $600 million from US-based asset management firm Fidelity, Blackrock and others, followed by a $100 million fundraise from US-based Invesco Developing Markets Fund.
Earlier this month, Mint reported that Pine Labs is in advanced negotiations to acquire Bangalore-based API infrastructure company Setu. In the past Pine Labs has acquired Southeast Asia-based fintech platform Fave for $45 million (Rs 337 crore) in April 2021. In July 2020, Pine Labs made a strategic investment in Fave.
Pine Labs previously acquired QwikCilver in 2019 for which it raised capital from Actis Advisors.