Walmart-owned PhonePe has received a fresh investment of $60 million from its Singapore-based parent company PhonePe Private Limited earlier known as Flipkart Payments Private Limited, showed regulatory filings. This is the fifth round, within a span of 12 months, raised by the company from its parent entity. PhonePe had raised around $103 million in March last year followed by around $97 million investment in July, approximately $57 million in October, and around $81.7 billion in December last year. PhonePe competes with SoftBank-backed Paytm, Google Pay, Amazon Pay etc, in the hyper-competitive digital payments market in India.
The regulatory filing sourced from business signals platform Paper.vc showed 10,07, 670 shares were allotted in the current round as per the resolution passed through circulation by board of directors of PhonePe Private Limited on February 12, 2020. “PhonePe has received the lion’s share of its funding since Walmart’s acquisition of Flipkart in 2018. During 2018 and 2019, PhonePe received around $700 million in funding as the ever-expanding digital payments space heats up in India,” Nikhil Kanekal, Analyst, Paper.vc said in a note shared with Financial Express Online.
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Flipkart had announced in October 2017 that it would invest $500 million in PhonePe. The current round could be part of the amount committed. In five rounds so far, the company has invested $338.7 million. PhonePe has raised $558 million across eight rounds overall, as per deals tracker Crunchbase.
PhonePe had announced earlier this month that it would spend around $111 million (Rs 800 crore) on marketing in the calendar year 2020. As of January 31, 2019, PhonePe had over 185 million registered users while monthly active users were 76 million, according to the data shared by the company. Its total merchant base stood at more than 9.5 million even as 69 per cent of its transactions were recorded in tier-II and III cities. The company, valued at around $7 billion as per a Morgan Stanley report, saw its net income increasing 401 per cent against 141 per cent rise in its net loss for FY2019. While the income for FY19 was Rs 245.8 crore, the losses were at Rs 19,047 million.
