Walmart Inc.-owned PhonePe has raised another $100 million (about Rs 820 crore) in the latest tranche of its ongoing fundraise in which the Indian digital payments platform is looking to raise as much as $1 billion.
The company secured the fresh capital from US private equity firm General Atlantic and its co-investors at a pre-money valuation of $12 billion. This is in addition to the $350 million PhonePe raised from General Atlantic in January.
The company had also raised $100 million from Tiger Global, Ribbit Capital and TVS Capital as well as $200 million from its parent firm Walmart as part of the mega fundraise. So far, it has raised $750 million as part of the ongoing round.
PhonePe is looking to deploy the funds to strengthen its infrastructure, including the development of data centres, and to build financial services offerings at scale in the country, the company had said at the time of announcing its $1 billion fundraise.
It also plans to invest in new businesses, including insurance, wealth management, Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC)-based shopping, and lending as well as scale UPI payments in India, including UPI lite and credit on UPI.
The fundraise follows PhonePe’s change of domicile to India and a spin-off from Walmart-owned e-commerce major Flipkart. The domicile shift cost the firm’s investors a whopping Rs 8,000 crore in taxes. PhonePe was acquired by the Flipkart Group in 2016.
PhonePe was founded in December 2015 by CEO Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari and Burzin Engineer. It offers several payments and financial services, including mutual funds and insurance products. It pits against the publicly listed Paytm and Google Pay in India’s digital payments space. It claims to have more than 400 million registered users and over 35 million offline merchants spread across India, covering 99% of PIN codes.
In the financial year 2021-22, PhonePe’s consolidated operating revenue more than doubled to Rs 1,646 crore from Rs 690 crore in FY21. However, its losses jumped to Rs 2,014 crore from Rs 1,728 crore in the previous fiscal year. The company is yet to report its financial statement for the last fiscal year.
PhonePe is the current market leader for UPI transactions in India. The platform stood as the top UPI app in the month of March as it processed nearly 47% of all UPI transactions. In total, it processed nearly 407.63 crore transactions worth Rs 7.07 lakh crore. PhonePe was followed by Google Pay and Paytm. In total, these three platforms accounted for nearly 96% of the total market share.
