Walmart Inc-backed PhonePe on Wednesday said it has raised $100 million in additional funding led by General Atlantic at a pre-money valuation of $12 billion, as part of its ongoing round that aims to raise up to $1 billion.
This comes less than a month after the company raised $200 million in funding from its majority shareholder Walmart. In February, PhonePe had raised $100 million from Ribbit Capital, Tiger Global, and TVS Capital Funds. It had raised $350 million in a fresh funding round led by private equity firm General Atlantic in January.
The company expects further investments to be announced in due course.
In the past, the company has said it will use the funds to build and scale new businesses like insurance, wealth management, lending, stockbroking, ONDC-based shopping, and account aggregators. The fundraising will also help PhonePe turbo-charge the next wave of growth for UPI payments in India, including UPI lite and Credit on UPI, the company said.
In the highly competitive UPI space in India, PhonePe, with over 400 million registered users, has outranked Google Pay and Paytm with a more than 45% market share in transactions. PhonePe’s current valuation of $12 billion also puts it ahead of digital payments unicorn Razorpay, which was last valued at around $7.5 billion.
Both PhonePe and its closest rival Paytm have been reporting losses. In light of the plummeting stock price of Paytm since its debut last year, PhonePe’s IPO debut will be closely watched.
Earlier this month, PhonePe launched an app called Pincode on the Indian government’s open network to strengthen its e-commerce business.