Mobile commerce and payments platform Paytm plans to make strategic investments in about 3-4 large start-ups and about 5 early stage start-ups in the next one and a half years.

The ticket size of Paytm’s investments would be $15-50 million each and it plans to pick up 20-40 per cent stake in these companies.

According to Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and CEO, all investments would be made through Paytm.

‘No acquisition’

“We are looking at picking up stakes in tech start-ups that would provide us support to strengthen logistics, delivery and local services among others. Besides, we are actively looking at the food and beauty space. We are not going to acquire any company,” he said.

Paytm, backed by the world’s largest Internet company Alibaba, had recently made an investment in online to offline (O2O) deals start-up Little, which has been started by the founders of fashion portal Zovi.com.

The Delhi-based company strategically follows and imitates Alibaba, which also believes in investing in a start-up rather than acquiring it. Alibaba Group Holding and its affiliate Ant Financial are said to be investing over $1 billion in the growing online-to-offline (O2O) in China.

“The O2O deals space in India is very unorganised and about 99 per cent of the commerce happens in the offline market. There was a huge opportunity we saw in this segment to bring it online,” Sharma added.

Paytm, that entered the marketplace segment to compete with companies such as Flipkart and Snapdeal, said that it has achieved a significant milestone in its attempt to revolutionise India’s m-commerce landscape. It has crossed 100 million Paytm Wallet users who carry out over 75 million transactions every month. With this achievement, Paytm has inched closer towards its larger vision of transforming India into a “cash-free” economy.  

RBI-approved

Paytm is a RBI approved secure mobile wallet. Using Paytm, customers can pay bills, recharge mobile/DTH, shop online and pay for various online services. 

Accepted at over 80,000 merchants, Paytm plans to reach 10 million merchants by the end of next year. Users can load money to Paytm wallet using debit card, credit card, net banking and over 20,000 cash deposit points. Paytm is partnering with various banks to enable users to add money through bank branches and ATM machines.

 

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