Indian mobile payments giant PhonePe bags additional $200 million investment
Walmart, a US-based e-commerce company that owns a majority stake in Bengaluru-headquartered PhonePe, has invested $200 million in the Indian startup.
This investment is the third tranche of an ongoing funding round that has allowed PhonePe to raise a total of $650 million in recent weeks, despite the market downturn. It had previously raised $350 million led by private equity firm, General Atlantic in January and another $100 million from Tiger Global and Ribbit in February.
PhonePe, which recently separated from the ex-parent firm Flipkart and completed its relocation from Singapore to India aims to raise up to $1 billion through this financing round, and the ongoing round has valued the company at a pre-money valuation of $12 billion, making it India's most valuable fintech startup.
According to the digital payments major, it plans to deploy these funds to build and scale new businesses like insurance, wealth management, lending, stockbroking, and Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC)-based shopping and account aggregators. It will also help PhonePe grow Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payments in the country, where it is already the market leader.
PhonePe competes with other digital payment services like Google Pay and Paytm, and currently dominates over 50% of all UPI transactions in India, processing more than 4 billion of the total 8 billion transactions per month.