Months after topping up its payment platform PhonePe’s wallet with ₹518 crore, e-commerce major Flipkart has once again pumped in ₹451.66 crore into PhonePe, as per RoC documents sourced from business intelligence platform Paper.vc.

Late last year, Flipkart committed an investment of $500 million into PhonePe to take on competition from Paytm. This is in addition to the $75 million that Flipkart had invested in PhonePe since acquiring it in 2015.

PhonePe, which is among the leaders in driving merchant UPI transactions in India, will use the money to ward off competition from Google’s Tez and WhatsApp’s Pay, which are disrupting the payments space in the country.

Offline partnerships

Aiming to become the number one digital payments partner in the organised retail sector, PhonePe is scaling up offline partnerships, teaming up with national chains such as Café Coffee Day, Apollo Pharmacy, Barista, Spencer’s, KFC, FoodWorld, Pai International and Goli Vada Pav.

“We want to play in the all the points where money is exchanged, from mobile recharges to shopping for vegetables. PhonePe is much more than just a wallet app, it is a payments container that enables multiple modes of payments via the mobile phone,” Pradeep Dodle, Head of Business Development, had told BusinessLine in an earlier interaction.

The Bengaluru headquartered company is one of the fastest growing payments companies in the country with over 100 million users. Using PhonePe, users can send and receive money, recharge mobile, DTH, datacards, make utility payments and buy gold.

PhonePe is accepted as a payments option across 3 lakh offline and online merchant outlets covering food, travel, groceries, movie tickets, etc.

PhonePe also offers microapps within its platform allowing customers to avail Ola, RedBus and Goibibo Hotel services.

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