New Delhi: PhonePe, the Indian fintech startup, has received an additional $100 million in investment from General Atlantic, a New York-based growth equity investor. This comes just three months after General Atlantic led a $350 million investment round in the company. PhonePe has now raised $750 million in total for its ongoing financing round, which values the company at $12 billion, making it India’s most valuable fintech startup.
PhonePe competes with other Indian fintech companies, such as Google Pay and Paytm, with the latter currently valued at nearly $5 billion. However, PhonePe dominates transactions on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a network built by a coalition of retail banks in India, processing more than 50% of all transactions by value. UPI processes more than 8 billion transactions a month, with PhonePe and Google’s GPay currently processing more than 80% of all UPI transactions.
The seven-year-old company, which completed a full separation from e-commerce giant Flipkart last year, is not slowing down. Earlier this year, PhonePe stated that it was on track to process transactions worth $1 trillion annually. Walmart, which owns a majority share in Flipkart, said 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.”
General Atlantic, which has backed a number of Indian firms over the past decade, including Jio, BillDesk, Byju’s, Amagi, NoBroker, and Unacademy, plans to deploy at least $2 billion to $3 billion in India over the next five to seven years. The investment in PhonePe is in line with General Atlantic’s strategy of backing companies that have a significant impact on the Indian market and can scale rapidly.
The Indian fintech market has seen significant growth in recent years, and companies like PhonePe have played a major role in driving this growth. With General Atlantic’s investment, PhonePe is well-positioned to continue its dominance of the UPI market and expand its offerings in the Indian fintech space.
