- Pine Labs receives US$20 million investment from the State Bank of India
- Pine Labs raised US$600 million from investors in 2021
- The company is looking to invest in its newly launched brand of online payment products
Pine Labs has started 2022 with a big announcement. The leading merchant commerce platform has received a new investment of US$20 million from India’s largest commercial bank, the State Bank of India (SBI).
Pine Labs a fintech company that serves prominent large, mid-sized, and small merchants across India and Southeast Asia.
Its cloud-based software platform enables it to offer a wide range of payment acceptance and merchant commerce solutions including enterprise automation systems such as inventory management and customer relationship management. Its stored value platform includes issuing, processing, and distributing digital gift cards for corporate customers around the world.
Pine Labs has recorded incredible success thus far. In 2021 alone, the company raised almost US$600 million from a marquee set of new investors and followed it up with a US$100 million fundraise from the US-based Invesco Developing Markets Fund.
In addition to augmenting its merchant commerce offerings at the offline point-of-sale, Pine Labs is now looking to invest in scaling Plural, its newly launched brand of online payment products, and emerge as an omnichannel partner of choice for merchants.
According to B. Amrish Rau, CEO, Pine Labs, having the largest bank of India, the State Bank of India places their trust in them, welcomes them in this journey where they are empowering merchants with seamless and secure payment experiences across offline and online platforms.
“In the last one year, several marquee investors have placed their trust in our business model and growth momentum and that is a gratifying feeling. This association with SBI is a personally satisfying experience as I had started my career selling financial services technology to SBI,” added Rau.
In April 2021, Pine Labs acquired Southeast Asian startup Fave in a deal valued at US$45 million as the Indian firm looks to strengthen its consumer-focused offerings in the domestic and international markets.
Since then, the company has continued expanding its Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) business across India and Southeast Asia. It also has a leading presence in the Gift, Prepaid and Stored Value segment through its 2019 acquisition of Qwikcilver.
The BNPL industry has been seeing growing competition in Southeast Asia as more companies are now jumping on the bandwagon and offering such services. Last month, Pine Labs announced a regional partnership with insurtech firm Igloo as well.
Towards the end of 2021, Pine Labs also announced the launch of Plural Tokenizer, a tokenization solution that works across leading card networks. This Card-on-File or CoF tokenization solution will replace the debit or credit card details of the cardholder with what are called ‘tokens’ or randomly generated numbers. The launch is in line with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) guidelines that mandate no entity other than the card issuer or card networks to store actual cardholder data with took effect from January 1, 2022.
