Paytm Entertainment bags $4.5 Mn from parent entity; valuation soars to $81 Mn

Paytm Entertainment, a wholly-owned subsidiary of One97 Communication, has received Rs 31.68 crore in a fresh round of capital infusion by the holding entity.

The latest investment comes after a gap of 15 months for the entertainment arm, that develops and operates an online ticketing platform for booking movie and event tickets.

According to RoC filing with MCA, One97 was allotted 35,20,000 equity shares for a consideration of Rs 90 per share. In more than three years of operations, the firm has raised over $13 million from the Noida-based parent company.

Post investment, Paytm Entertainment will be valued at around Rs 580 crore.

Since its foray into movie and event ticketing space, Paytm has been competing with incumbent rival BookMyShow. To up its ante, the Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led firm had also acquired TicketNew–a Chennai-based online movie ticketing platform from Alibaba.

Alibaba Pictures, an affiliate of Alibaba Group, had sold TicketNew for about $40 million. Besides, Paytm had also acquired a majority stake in Mumbai-based ticketing platform Insider.in.

Paytm forayed into this segment with a partnership with PVR Cinemas and has tied up various movie screens across multiplex brands including PVR, INOX, and Cinepolis among multiple regional chains.

Since 2017, Paytm hasn't revealed the number of movie ticket sold via its platform. On the other hand, BookMyShow, according to the latest data available, sells around 200 million movie tickets annually and claims to have sold tickets worth Rs 350 crore in 2019.

Apart from the top two leaders, Paytm's largest stakeholder Alibaba has been planning to enter OTT space over two years. However, the plan seems to have taken a backseat. To understand the short and long video consumption patterns and trends, Alibaba invested in video analytic firm Vidooly.

Hat tip: paper.vc