Payments firm Pine Labs raises $600 million as it plans to go public by 2022

• Pine Labs has raised this $600 million round at a valuation of $3 billion, CEO Amrish Rau confirmed.
• The round was co-led by Fidelity Management & Research Co and BlackRock Inc.
• The company is likely to go public in the US by next year.

Merchant payment solutions company Pine Labs has closed a $600 million (₹4,459 crore) funding round, as it targets to go for an initial public offering (IPO) within 18 months (by 2022). The company is valued at $3 billion, its chief executive officer (CEO) Amrish Rau has confirmed.

The round was co-led by Fidelity Management & Research Co and BlackRock Inc, with participation from a fund managed by Neuberger Berman Investment Advisers LLC, IIFL Asset Management Company (AMC) and Kotak.

IIFL AMC is investing through its late-stage tech fund, whereas Kotak’s investment is subject to approval from market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI).

Pine Labs, founded in 1998 by Lokvir Kapoor, is a merchants payment solution that enables businesses to accept online and offline digital retail transactions. According to a previous press note shared by the company, it powers over 140,000 merchants, 3.5 lakh points of sale (PoS) terminals across 3,700 cities and towns in India and Malaysia.

Its customers include Apple, Starbucks Corp, McDonald's Corp., among others. The company is now headed by Amrish Rau.

The company serves prominent large, mid-sized and small merchants across Asia and the Middle East. Pine Labs’ cloud-based platform enables it to offer a wide range of payment acceptance and merchant commerce solutions, including enterprise automation systems such as inventory management and customer relationship management.

Pine Labs also has a stored value platform that enables merchants to issue, process, and distribute digital gift cards for corporate customers around the world.

The company acquired Fave, a Kuala Lumpur-based payments and discovery platform, in April 2021. Pine Labs was looking to build a consumer-centric vertical for discounts and discovery in India and Southeast Asia with this acquisition. Over 6 million consumers across over 40,000 merchant establishments now have access to the Fave app, the company said in its recent press note.

“Over the last year, Pine Labs has made significant progress in its offline-to-online strategy in India and the direct-to-consumer play in Southeast Asia. Our full-stack approach to payments and merchant commerce has allowed us to grow in-month merchant partnerships by nearly 100% over the last year,” Rau said in the statement.

Rau in an interview with Bloomberg, also discussed Pine Labs’ IPO plan, which will likely take place in the US. “With our size and scale, we want to make it a global IPO...We’ve got a good, Ebitda-positive [earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation] story as we plan our IPO in the next 18 months,” he added.

Pine Labs has raised over $1.2 billion to date, and counts Sequoia Capital, Temasek Holdings, Actis, PayPal and Mastercard, among others, as investors. The latest round is Pine Labs’ fourth funding round in the last 18 months, and its valuation has tripled in the same period.

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