Pine Labs snags major funding

Actis has headed up an $82 million investment in Indian digital retail payments platform, Pine Labs. It was joined in this by new investor Altimeter Capital.  

Pine Labs, whose largest shareholder is Sequoia India, is replacing the standard card-centric PoS terminal with a cloud-based platform. It currently processes 450 million transactions worth over $15 billion, on an annualised basis. “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,” says Lokvir Kapoor, CEO at Pine Labs. “With this capital, we will accelerate our network penetration in India and expand outside India with our world class technology.”

Pine Labs integrates India’s top 12 credit and debit card issuing banks, and the top 14 merchant-acquirers, on its payment platform. Over 75,000 merchants across India’s retail, e-commerce, electronics, food and beverage, fashion, financial, pharmacy, telecom and airlines industries are now using it. It handles approximately 15% of India’s cashless transactions in physical retail stores and is currently deployed at around 300,000 payment acceptance terminals. The company aims to reach one million payment acceptance points in India in the next three to five years.