Three months after spearheading a $350 million investment in PhonePe, General Atlantic has added $100 million to the Indian fintech startup’s $750 million fundraising round.
Walmart-backed PhonePe filed the investment with the local authority on Wednesday. Company representatives verified the investment—the $12 billion round values the Bengaluru-based firm. PhonePe is seeking $250 million in the current round.
PhonePe is India’s most valued financial firm at $12 billion. It competes with Google Pay and Paytm, worth $5 billion.
PhonePe, which split from Flipkart last year, leads UPI transactions. UPI conducts around 8 billion transactions a month for Indians. GPay and PhonePe handle 80% of UPI transactions.
PhonePe controls 50% of these transactions by value and is growing. This year, the business is predicted to process $1 trillion in transactions.
Walmart, which holds a controlling stake in Flipkart, stated earlier this year that the separation of Flipkart and PhonePe was “very analogous to eBay and PayPal, where each of them operating independently can pursue their own initiatives.”
According to sources, General Atlantic, which has invested in Jio, BillDesk, Byju’s, Amagi, NoBroker, and Unacademy over the past decade, plans to invest $2 billion to $3 billion in India over the next five to seven years.
PhonePe is actively adding products, prompting investment. This month, the business released Pincode, a hyperlocal commerce software backed by the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), an Indian government effort to democratize e-commerce via a zero-commission platform.
PhonePe would “invest significant effort” in Pincode and “enabling every Indian shopkeeper spread across every nook and corner, over the next few years.”
PhonePe plans to offer wealth management, loans, stockbroking, ONDC-based purchasing, and account aggregation to its 450 million registered users.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which manages the UPI network, wanted to limit market share for participating businesses, which might hinder PhonePe’s development. As a result, the NPCI delayed the compliance deadline to 2025, giving PhonePe two years of fast development.
In another positive development, India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, abandoned a high-profile initiative intended to compete with UPI.
