Fintech company PhonePe said on Friday it has raised an additional $200 million (around Rs 1,650 crore) in primary capital from Walmart at a pre-money valuation of $12 billion.
The funding is a part of PhonePe’s ongoing fundraise of up to $1 billion in capital, following its domicile shift to India from Singapore last year, the company said in a statement.
Walmart will continue as a majority investor after this investment, PhonePe said.
With this tranche, the company has raised $650 million from several global investors.In the first tranche of the $1 billion fundraise, PhonePe raised about $350 million from General Atlantic, Ribbit Capital, Tiger Global and TVS Capital Funds, in January. Last month, the fintech giant secured $100 million in primary capital from Tiger Global, Ribbit Capital and TVS Capital Funds.
The company expects to raise additional funding in coming months.
PhonePe plans to utilize these proceeds to scale new businesses including insurance, wealth management, lending, stockbroking, Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC)-based shopping, among others. It also looks to usher growth in the UPI Lite and Credit on UPI segments.
The fintech firm, which completed its separation from Walmart-backed e-commerce giant Flipkart early this year, moved its domicile from Singapore to India, a move that cost the firm’s investors a whopping Rs 8,000 crore in taxes. PhonePe was acquired by Flipkart in 2016.
With the domicile separation, existing shareholders of Flipkart Singapore and PhonePe Singapore, led by Walmart, bought shares directly in PhonePe India. This was aimed at allowing both companies to chart their own growth paths, and maximize enterprise value for their shareholders.
Sameer Nigam, founder and chief executive of PhonePe, said the fundraise will help the company in its next phase of growth as it builds new offerings for consumers and merchants.
Founded in 2015 by Nigam, Rahul Chari and Burzin Engineer, PhonePe forayed into financial services in 2017 and has since introduced several mutual funds and insurance products on the platform. It claims to have more than 450 million registered users and 35 million offline merchants spread across India, covering 99% of pin codes in the country.
As per data provided by the National Payments Corporation of India, PhonePe’s UPI transaction volume was the highest in February at about 3.5 billion transactions, followed by PayTm Payments Bank and Google Pay, which recorded 1.1 billion, and 2.6 billion transactions during the month, respectively.