Digital Retail Payments Firm Pine Labs Raises $82M USD Led By Actis

Announcements, Investing | March 14, 2018 By:

India-based digital retail payments platform Pine Labs has raised $82 million in an investment round led by growth markets investor Actis. Altimeter Capital also participated in the funding round.

Under the agreement, Actis will get a board seat for its investments in Pine Labs, while Altimeter Capital will have an “observer” status.

Pine Labs provides payment, loyalty, and retail automation systems in India. The company offers a cloud-based point-of-sale (PoS) payments solutions, allowing merchants to accept credit or debit card payments, as well as latest methods such as e-wallets, QR code payment solutions and unified payments interface (UPI)-based solutions.

Pine Labs, which handles approximately 15% of India’s cashless transactions in physical retail stores, is currently deployed at approximately 300,000 payment acceptance terminals. It aims to reach one million payment acceptance points in India in the next three to five years. Currently, the company claims to process 450 million transactions worth over $15 billion on an annualized basis, helping drive the government’s “Digital India” mission.

The latest funding will be used to develop new services for merchants over and above the basic payments processing service, and to expand into international markets.

“This investment is a strong endorsement of the value of the merchant-first payments platform that we have built – and the tremendous value Pine Labs brings to the platform’s other participants, including shoppers, banks and brands,” said Lokvir Kapoor, CEO of Pine Labs. “With this capital, we will accelerate Pine’s network penetration in India and expand outside India with our world class technology.”

Pine Labs’ shareholders include Sequoia India, which first invested in 2009 and continues to support the company’s expansion plans as its largest shareholder.

“Pine Labs is a special investment for Sequoia India, because it is a story of incredible grit, first-principles innovation, and company building by Lokvir and the management team that spans more than a decade,” said Shailendra Singh, Managing Director at Sequoia Capital (India) Singapore. “Pine Labs has emerged into a category-defining company with a new cloud-based model for retail payments that supports all payments types. It’s a platform that took years to build and provides a very defensible foundation for the next phase of growth in products and markets.”

“We are thrilled to become a key investor in Pine Labs and partner with Lokvir Kapoor and Sequoia India who together have built a tremendous business in India,” Asanka Rodrigo, Partner and Head of South Asia at Actis. “We are keenly looking forward to working closely with the team at Pine Labs over the coming years.”