IPO-bound fintech startup Pine Labs is aiming to bolster its payments ecosystem in India by making a “significant majority investment” into Mosambee, an end-to-end payment solution provider.
Mosambee, which has a base of 1 million SME merchants and various government departments, is now valued at upwards of $100 million with this latest deal.
Explaining the strategy behind making the investment, Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau said that the company found a gap when it comes to retail merchant categories even as it was increasing its product stack.
“As we expand our product offering into commerce-related services, and also into financial services, these retail merchants can become a very relevant target segment. That is where Mosambee can plug the gap for us,” he was quoted as saying by the Moneycontrol news website.
Rau said separately in a press statement said that Mosambee was a natural fit for Pine Labs due to the shared purpose of making innovative fintech products accessible to all and driving forward the digital payment revolution in India.
The leadership team at Mosambee will continue to operate independently and use its proprietary tech platform that serves clients across diverse industry verticals.
“Pine Labs was our first partner when we launched our platform. Mosambee today caters to a wide array of businesses, from SMEs to private and government entities to leading banking institutions in India. With the extensive reach of Pine Labs and their portfolio companies, we aim to continue to deliver strong profitability and breakthrough solutions to our clients,” Sameer Chugh, co-founder of Mosambee said in a joint statement.
In February 2022, Mosambee announced the acquisition of Benow, a digital payments and EMI (electronic money institution) technology platform.
Pine Labs is also scaling its Pay Later proposition to newer markets outside India, and recently announced the ‘Mastercard Instalments with Pine Labs’ program in association with Mastercard and DBS Bank to enable interest-free instalment purchase options to the two million DBS Bank cardholders in Singapore, Indonesia and Hong Kong.
In February this year, Pine Labs also acquired Qfix Infocomm to strengthen its play in the online payments gateway segment. In April 2021, it had acquired Fave for $45 million to enter the consumer payments space. Meanwhile, Pine Lab is reportedly in talks to acquire fintech infrastructure company Setu.
“We will invest in any capabilities that allow us to build our core segments better and help us get into that fast. In some cases we will do it organically. and inorganically in others,” Rau said.
As of March 2022, Pine Labs had more than 250,000 merchant relationships across over 675,000 merchant network touchpoints in India and Southeast Asia.
With more than 25 issuers on its platform at present, Pine Labs claims that it has a market leading presence in the offline Pay Later segment in India.
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