General Atlantic, which had previously invested $350 million in the financial technology platform PhonePe in January 2023, has contributed an additional $100 million to the funding round for the company. Because of this, the Bengaluru-based decacorn has brought in a total of $750 million in funding over the course of the last three months.
The most recent fundraising is a part of PhonePe’s $1 billion round of funding that came after the company moved its domicile to India a year ago. PhonePe has raised the most recent round of funding at the same pre-money valuation of $12 billion as it did with earlier rounds. Following in the footsteps of Flipkart and Byju’s as India’s third most highly valued privately held company is PhonePe. It is important to emphasise that BlackRock, which is Byju’s investor, recently reduced the company’s valuation by fifty percent.
This new breakthrough occurred not long after the company made its debut in the e-commerce sector with the introduction of Pincode, a hyperlocal consumer app that is connected to the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) protocol.
According to the company, it would use the proceeds to expand its payments and insurance businesses in India, as well as to establish and aggressively scale new companies such as loans, stockbroking, ONDC, and account aggregators over the next several years. In addition, it will utilise the revenues to scale up its existing businesses in India.
PhonePe plans to turn its primary business into a profitable venture by the year 2023. In order to achieve this goal, the company is placing a significant bet on financing, cross-sell potential, gateway business, and now e-commerce. However, according to the data from the previous year, PhonePe’s revenue increased 2.4 times, from Rs 690 crore in FY21 to Rs 1,646 crore in FY22. During the most recent fiscal year, the company’s losses increased by only 16.5% to a total of Rs 2,014 crore. According to the company’s valuation report, which can be viewed through a regulatory filing, the business has made more improvements to its balance sheet and has reported a revenue of 1,913 crore for the first nine months (January to September) of 2022.
PhonePe asserts that it has attained an annualised TPV (Total payment value) run rate of $1 trillion (roughly Rs 84 lakh crore). The company has more than 400 million users that have registered with it. It also dominates the UPI market, where it holds more than half of the market share in terms of value. Its competitors Google Pay and Paytm have a significant distance to make up in terms of the volume and value of transactions.
