PhonePe raises $350 Mn at over $12 Bn valuation

Fintech platform PhonePe today announced it has raised $350 million in a new funding round led by General Atlantic at a pre-money valuation of $12 billion. 

According to PhonePe, the investment marks the first tranche of $1 billion that commenced in January 2023. With this, it has become the most valued fintech startup (privately funded) in India.

The fundraise follows PhonePe’s recently announced change of domicile to India and full separation from Flipkart. Last month, the firm became a fully India-domiciled company. Previously, it was owned and operated by a Singapore entity.

PhonePe plans to deploy the new funds to make significant investments in infrastructure, including the development of data centers, and help build financial services offerings at scale in the country, the company said in a statement. It also plans to invest proceeds toward ramping up insurance, wealth management, and lending verticals.

To beef up its ecosystem, PhonePe acquired three companies in 2002 which include IndusOS, investment platform WealthDesk and wealth management platform OpenQ.

With over 400 million registered users, the company claims to have digitised over 35 million offline merchants spread across smaller cities. PhonePe has emerged as the poster boy of the unified payment interface or UPI ecosystem, leading consistently in terms of volume and value since December 2020 while other players including Google Pay and Paytm are far behind. As per NPCI data, it controls more than 45% market share in UPI transactions. Its dominance is likely to be continued in the future as NPCI has extended the deadline to meet the market cap deadline of 30% to December 31, 2024.

During FY22, PhonePe managed to grow its scale by 2.4X to Rs 1,646 crore from Rs 690 crore in FY21. Importantly, its losses barely grew 16.5% to Rs 2,014 crore during the last fiscal year (FY22).