Pine Labs, one of Asia’s merchant commerce platforms, has raised a fresh round of funding from Lone Pine Capital. With this investment, Pine Labs is now valued at over USD $2 billion.
“We are thrilled to welcome Lone Pine as an investor during this exciting and transformative phase of Pine Labs’ growth journey,” commented B. Amrish Rau, CEO, Pine Labs. “Small businesses and consumers are fast adopting to digital commerce and contactless checkout. We are also seeing tremendous uptake in Pay Later services and have now enabled nearly 150,000 outlets for this. It’s time to invest heavily in offline and online commerce across India and SEA.”
“We are excited to partner with Pine Labs as they innovate at scale in the payments and merchant commerce space, benefiting consumers, merchants and financial institutions,” said Mala Gaonkar, Portfolio Manager and Managing Director at Lone Pine. “The Pine Labs team is leveraging key structural changes taking place across payments and fintech globally, including the integration of software and payments at the point-of-sale, the digitization of small-to-medium enterprises, and the rapid adoption of buy-now-pay-later offerings. We look forward to the road ahead.”
Lone Pine’s investment follows the strategic investment made by Mastercard in January 2020, when Pine Labs attained unicorn status. Earlier in December, Pine Labs and Mastercard jointly announced that they will expand their integrated “pay later” solution to five South East Asian markets early next year.
Today, Pine Labs serves more than 150,000 merchants in 3,700 cities across Asia and the Middle East. In July 2020, the company made a strategic investment in Fave [myfave.com]. Together, the companies now provide cashless payment solutions to over 50,000 merchants across Malaysia, Singapore and other South East Asian countries.
-AK
Arya has been a part of the Content & Research Team at Hrnxt.com. She is a keen observer of economic developments, emerging businesses, people in business and keeps a tab on latest happenings in the business environment.