PhonePe with 200 million users is one of the biggest payment portals in India in competition with GooglePay, AmazonPay and Paytm. Started in December 2015, it was acquired by Flipkart in 2016 April. Now, Flipkart has invested $90 million combined in its marketplace entity and digital payment platform PhonePe. This new investment has brought PhonePe’s total funding to $928 million till date and Flipkart marketplace to $1.88 billion.
Walmart owns majority of the stakes in Flipkart Pvt. Ltd which allotted the investment in PhonePe. The competition between digital transaction platforms have increased two-fold after the announcement of Whatsapp Pay in partnership with Reliance Jio. This has definitely made things critical for other companies as well. The last month hasn’t been very fruitful considering the Covid-19 situations and company has been facing losses as the government has stopped sell of non-essential products.
Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari, founders of PhonePe have been looking for independent capital since last year but because of Walmart’s involvement and high share in stocks, it is quite hard. PhonePe is contemplating to put the company on Initial Public Offering (IPO) by 2023 after reaching high profitability rates by 2022.
PhonePe has been expanding its gamut to other services like food delivery, travel and entertainment. To meet current needs, the company has restructured its homepage providing only essential options like recharge, bill payments and money transfers. They have also launched a Covid-19 information dashboard on the app itself. The investment will be a crucial step right now to set trends in the current scenarios with so many emerging platforms.