Pine Labs, an India-based digital payments platform, has secured $82 million through its latest investment round, which was led by Actis Capital, with participation from Altimeter Capital. Founded in 1998, Pine Labs stated it began its journey with specialty payment & loyalty solutions for closed-user group applications for the retail petroleum industry. The company also reported it has evolved into a payments platform that connects more than 75,000 retailers in over 1,600 cities throughout India.
“What makes Pine Labs, a market leader today is constant innovation to develop new robust solutions which went beyond payment acceptance and helped retailers to acquire and engage customers [at] Point of Sale. Pine Labs merchants’ & partners’ get a robust platform to create new revenue streams with best-in-class value-added solutions. Today, this network can not only help complete a credit and debit card transaction, but also deliver credit to customers in the form of EMI programs, enable product companies to offer cashback to select cardholders, allow loyalty program companies to offer rewards as well as pay with earned points, allow lending companies to extend credit to merchants, etc.”
According to Live Mint, Pine Labs now processes 450 million transactions worth more than $15 billion on an annual basis. Lokvir Kapoor, CEO of Pine Labs, stated:
“We have a presence of about 300,000 PoS in the market, which is about 10% of the footprint in the country. We have about 15% of the card volume flowing through our network. We are growing in the domestic market at 60-70%, year-over-year. We have gone live in Malaysia, which is our first international market.”
In regards to future plans, Kapoor added:
“The plan is to continue to grow in the domestic market at the rate that we have been growing at. In the next three-to-four years we expect to grow from the current level of 300,000 to 1 million terminals, and we plan to go live in four or five markets over the next three-four years. In the next two-three years, we are looking at a revenue of around 25% from international markets.”