Fintech major PhonePe has raised another $100 million in primary capital from Ribbit Capital, Tiger Global and TVS Capital Funds, at a pre-money valuation of $12 billion. This new investment follows the recent $350-million primary fund-raise that closed on January 19.
PhonePe started its latest fund-raise with a target of raising up to $1 billion in capital, post its domicile shift to India. With this second tranche, it has already raised $450 million within six weeks from leading investors. The company expects further investments from global, as well as prominent high net worth Indian investors in due course.
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PhonePe plans to deploy these funds to scale up its payments and insurance businesses in India, as well as to launch and aggressively scale new businesses like Lending, Stockbroking, ONDC-based Shopping, and Account Aggregators over the next few years.
Speaking on the fund-raise, Sameer Nigam, CEO and Founder of PhonePe, said: ‘’I would like to thank Ribbit Capital, Tiger Global and TVS Capital Funds for reposing their faith in us. We are privileged to have a great set of leading global investors, both existing and new, who believe in our mission of building massive technology platforms to bring at-scale financial and digital inclusion in India.’’
“PhonePe lives by the same values as we do at Ribbit. We both believe that better money makes life better. PhonePe’s relentless pursuit of this principle in serving consumers and businesses all across India is a mission to live for,” said Micky Malka, Founder of Ribbit Capital. “We are excited to continue our partnership with PhonePe as they lead the digital payments sector in India, a market we believe is still in the early stages with significant growth potential ahead,” said Scott Shleifer, Partner, Tiger Global.
Best-in-class
“Our investment in PhonePe reinforces our conviction on backing best-in-class Founders while betting on the financial digitisation of the next 450 million Indians. We view this more as an opportunity in a population-scale business for New India, driven by an outstanding management team with razor-sharp focus, as driven by execution. PhonePe is the #1 transaction platform in India with an impressive moat of robust tech capabilities. Its strong growth in financial services across payments, insurance, and lending with unopened doors to two massive opportunities through ONDC and Appstore, were key reasons in our investment thesis,“ said Gopal Srinivasan, Chairman and Managing Director, TCF.
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PhonePe was founded in December 2015 and has 44 crore (440+ million) registered users. The company has also digitised 3.5 crore (35 million) offline merchants spread across Tier 2,3,4 and beyond, covering 99 per cent of pin codes in the country. PhonePe said it processes over 45 per cent of the transactions on the Bharat Bill Pay System (BBPS) platform.
PhonePe forayed into financial services in 2017, providing users with safe and convenient investing options on its platform. Since then, the company has introduced several Mutual Funds and Insurance products that offer every Indian an equal opportunity to unlock the flow of money and access to services.