Pine Labs to shift $500-m IPO to India
Abandoning the plan to list on Nasdaq, Pine Labs, a digital payments firm backed by Sequoia India and Mastercard, is now looking to introduce its $500-million initial public offering (IPO) in India, persons aware of the development said.
Pine Labs will do both a primary fund-raise and a secondary share sale in which Sequoia Capital may sell some of its stake, they further said.
The listing in India could take a while because the parent firm is registered in Singapore and this would require to be altered. The fintech firm is targeting a valuation of at least $6 billion, the persons mentioned above said.
Pine Labs had been considering the listing on Nasdaq and reportedly filed for the IPO ‘confidentially’ with the US Security and Exchanges Commission in January. The difficult conditions in the US market and the steep fall in the valuations of new-age tech firms prompted Pine Labs to rethink its options, sources said.
To date, Pine Labs has raised close to $1.2 billion in equity capital from Fidelity Management, BlackRock, State Bank of India, Alpha Wave Global, PayPal Ventures, Temasek Holdings and others. It has also made around five acquisitions, including that of Bengaluru-based Setu, an application programming interface infrastructure provider, for around $70-75 million.
Founded in 1998, Noida-based Pine Labs provides point-of-sale (PoS) machines to offline merchants for card transactions. In October last year, it made its first-ever foray into the payment gateway space with the launch of Plural, a suite of online payment products to gateway providers such as Razorpay and Billdesk.
Typically, Pine Labs targets large merchants rather than SMEs. Its business model consists of fixed rental for PoS machines and bundling value-added services (analytics, billing and reconciliation, EMI financing, loyalty programmes, etc). The fintech firm claims to serve more than 150,000 merchants, including in India, West Asia and Southeast Asia.
