PhonePe garners Rs254 cr from parent Flipkart’s Singapore arm
05 Oct 2017
Ecommerce firm Flipkart's digital payment platform PhonePe has secured fresh funding of over Rs254 crore from Singapore-based group entity Flipkart Payment, filings with the Registrar of Companies (RoC) under the corporate affairs ministry showed.
According to the documents, Flipkart Payments has been allotted 17.60 lakh shares of face value of Rs10 each at a premium of about Rs1,435 each, aggregating to Rs254.43 crore on a rights basis. The resolution to this effect was passed at the meeting of board of directors of PhonePe on 30 August 2017.
Previously, PhonePe had received Rs83.68 crore in October, 2016 through allocation of 41.84 lakh shares at a premium of Rs190 per share.
Formerly known as FX Mart Private Ltd, PhonePe competes with the likes of Amazon Pay, Paytm and Mobikwik. The new funding will help it its position in the market at a time when digital transactions are gaining popularity.
PhonePe has said that it drove 45 per cent of all UPI (digital payment) transactions in August this year at 7.47 million, and saw 66 per cent growth in volume of transactions over the previous month.
In a blog post in August it claimed to have achieved $2.5 billion total payment volume (TPV) annual run rate. ''The PhonePe mobile app has been downloaded by over 40 million Indians in the past 10 months,'' the blog said.
The funding in PhonePe comes after Flipkart had received $2.5 billion from investors including SoftBank early this year. Flipkart also raised $1.4 billion from Microsoft, Tencent and eBay Inc in April this year.
The fresh funding will help the digital payment platform ward off competition in the financial technology sector that is getting increasingly crowded with the entry of new players. Just a few days ago, Google launched its UPI-based payment platform, Tez, and garnered more than 4 lakh of active users in less than 24 hours of its launch.
The payments space in India has become crowded after demonetisation. The space saw the entry of not only large players such as Amazon, Flipkart, Uber and Ola, but also some acquisitions like Freecharge being bought by Axis and PayU buying Citrus Pay last year.
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