Fintech platform Pine Labs has confidentially filed for an IPO with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Bloomberg news reported on Monday, citing close sources privy to the matter. Pine Labs has so far not commented on this report.      

This development has come to the fore barely days after SBI, India’s largest bank, announced that it has invested $20 Mn in Pine Labs.

The report further claims that the Mastercard and Sequoia backed company is seeking to raise $500 Mn at a valuation of $5.5-7 bn. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have been roped in to work for the IPO proceedings.   

The rumours about the Noida and Singapore based company vying for an IPO listing has been circulating since last year. The fintech major, by the way, witnessed frenetic activities in the just concluded 2020. From raising $600 Mn in July from set of marquee investors, following a $100 Mn top up from U S based Invesco to entering in the payment gateway space.

Pine Labs was founded way back in 2008, when a resilient startup ecosystem and strong VC culture did not exist. The company offers slew of payment solutions to the merchants like instore, POS, pay later and online payment solutions.   

The company competes with several heavily funded startups in the fintech space. This includes the likes of Payu, Razorpay and Instamojo among others.   

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The round also witnessed secondary transaction that paved way for the partial exit of two Chinese investors as well as the complete exit of one prominent Chinese investor. Chinese smartphone major and existing investor Xiaomi has reportedly made a complete exit from the company.

Commenting on the latest funding, Madhusudan E, Co-Founder & CEO of KreditBee said ““We started with a dream to help the unserved and underserved segment who have always found it difficult to enter the formal lending sector, either due to lengthy offline processes or traditional underwriting methods.”

“With a larger portfolio of loan products, our objective is to provide credit to over 180 Million New-to-Credit customers who were not provided formal credit earlier. This investment would help us take more positive steps towards achieving that.”

It must be noted that over the years, KreditBee has also raised debt from several high-profile banks including ICICI Bank, AU Small Finance Bank, Bank of Baroda and HSBC Bank.

Launched in 2018, KreditBee is a full-stack digital lending platform for young professionals. The Fintech startup specializes in providing digital personal loans and consumer durable loans to both salaried and self-employed employees.

Within the span of two years, the Bengaluru headquartered seems to have come a long way and today it claims to be India’s fastest growing personal loan platform.

With COVID-19 lockdown taking toll on financial markets, last year wasn’t really good for Fintech startups. However, this year Fintech industry seems to recovering slowly and steadily from the coronavirus impact.

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This is Delhi based startup’s second fundraising in coronavirus hit 2020. In July this year, the NBFC had raised more than INR 200 Cr in series E round led by Capital G – Google’s investment arm.

Aye Finance’s two back-to-back funding has come at a time when the NBFC and Fintech sector has been badly hit by coronavirus lockdown that lasted for almost 5-6 months. With nationwide lockdown bringing MSME business to a grinding halt and consumer spending hitting a new low, Fintech sector’s loan recovery activities have been badly affected.

Although Aye Finance is purely focused on micro-entrepreneurs, the impact of COVID-19 lockdown on the startup’s business cannot be ruled out completely.

Founded in 2014, Aye Finance solely focuses on providing affordable loans to micro-enterprises or micro-entrepreneurs, who are often overlooked by banks and financial institutions.

The startup claims that it has so far managed to support 58 million enterprises and 500 Mn livelihoods. The startup competes with Fintech NBFCs like Equitas, Ujjivan, Veritas Funding, and Synchrony Financial.

The six-year-old startup counts high profile investors Google G, LGT Lightstone, Falcon Edge, A91 Partners and MAJ Invest.

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Pine Labs is currently India’s third-largest Fintech startup following Paytm and PhonePe. It is also one of the few fintech startups that count both Masterpay and PayPal as its co-investors.

Pine Labs Co-founder and CEO Amrish Rau made the announcement about Pine Labs’ latest funding on his official Twitter.

“We are thrilled to welcome Lone Pine as an investor during the exciting and transformative phase of Pine Labs’ growth journey, commented B. Amrish Rau, CEO Pine Labs. “Small businesses and consumers are adopting to digital commerce and contactless checkout. We’re also seeing tremendous uptake in pay later services and have now enabled 150,000 outlets for this. It is time to invest heavily in offline and online commerce across India and South East Asia.”

Mala Gaonkar, Managing Director Lone Pine, said “we’re excited to partner with Pine Labs as they innovate at scale in the payment and merchant commerce space, benefitting consumers, merchants and financial institutions,” said Mala Gaonkar, MD Lone Pine said.

Pine Labs was recently in news for making a strategic investment in Singapore-based digital platform QR payment startup Fave.  Fave and Pine Labs have a common investor in the form of Sequoia. Through this investment, Pine Labs is seeking to consolidate its position in the critical Southeast Asian market.

The Noida-based startup was also recently in news for hiring Nitish Asthana as the new COO & President.

Pine Labs competes with many well-funded startups including Mswipe and Razorpay, with the latter having recently raised $100 Mn to become the latest unicorn startup in India.

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