Flipkart infuses Rs 452 crore into PhonePe

Homegrown ecommerce major Flipkart has infused fresh capital to the tune of Rs 452 crore into its digital payments arm PhonePe Pvt Ltd.

According to regulatory documents sourced from Paper.VC, PhonePe received the latest funding from Flipkart Payments Private Limited, Singapore, through a Rights Issue approved by the board on July 9, 2018.

PhonePe has allotted 21,40,602 equity shares of face value of Rs 10 each at a premium of Rs 2,100 each, aggregating to Rs 451.66 crore as fully paid-up shares to Flipkart.

The infusion of fresh capital will help PhonePe take on the competition from digital payments major Paytm, which is backed by SoftBank. Flipkart acquired PhonePe in April 2016.

In two funding rounds, PhonePe has raised a total of Rs 770 crore.

Earlier, last week, PhonePe became the largest UPI-based payments player in the country, according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India. With 111 million transactions in July, and with $20 billion annualised total payment volume (TPV) run rate, the company is growing aggressively. In November last year, it launched its own point of sale device.

In July, PhonePe acquired the point of sale (PoS) business of Zopper, a hyperlocal mobile marketplace for small and medium-sized businesses, as part of its efforts to grow the business. PhonePe wants to leverage Zopper Retail's domain expertise to rapidly expand its offline merchant network across the country.

Co-founded in 2015 by Sameer Nigam, the digital payments company has been rapidly expanding merchant base, and is now accepted as a payment option across three lakh offline and online merchant outlets spanning food, travel, groceries, taxi cabs, and movie ticketing, among others. PhonePe believes offline presence is going to be the game changer for the company in the next quarter.

By the end of this year, its target is to reach over a million small outlets in select cities in the states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, Goa, Delhi and Punjab.