Ahead of mega round, PhonePe receives Rs 698 Cr from holding entity

Amidst reports of raising the much talked about mega round from the likes of Tencent and Tiger Global, Flipkart-owned PhonePe has received a fresh round of Rs 698 crore from its Singapore-based parent entity - PhonePe Private Limited.

This is a part of Flipkart's $500 million commitment for PhonePe, which was announced in October 2017. Last, the payments firm had received Rs 743 crore from the holding entity formerly known as Flipkart Payments.

During the same period, PhonePe also got the nod from the parent entity to hive off and raise funds independently. If the plan goes through, PhonePe may become the second Unicorn from digital payments space after Paytm.

The fresh capital infusion comes at a time when rivalry amongst its competitors is becoming intense, especially in the UPI-enabled payments ecosystem.

While UPI-powered payments space is being largely driven by Google Pay, PhonePe has emerged as the second fastest-growing company in terms of transactions volume via NPCI-owned payments railroad.

It's also giving a close fight to Paytm in terms of offline merchant payments.

Citing sources, an ET report said that PhonePe clocked around 230 million UPI transactions on its platform in June, and has acquired close to 55 lakh merchants for QR code-based payments.

The firm has recorded a steep rise in overall digital transaction gaining from one billion transactions in November 2018 to 2 billion transactions as of April 2019 on the mobile application.

It also claimed to achieve an annual run-rate of $70 billion on transactions from its platform.

PhonePe's mega-round will also test its mettle as Google Pay and Paytm will remain in the fight with billion dollars in hand. Of late, Paytm also shifted its focus to incentivise merchant-based payments instead of consumer-focused UPI payments. It will be interesting to watch PhonePe as well as Google Pay and Paytm's next move to counter each other.