Fintech platform PhonePe has announced that it has raised additional $200 million in primary capital from Walmart at a pre-money valuation of $12 billion. The company is in the process of raising $1 billion following its move to domicile in India which has been under progress since last year, a statement by the company revealed. In addition, the company has raised $650 million so far from several global investors. The funds will be deployed to build and scale new businesses like insurance, wealth management, lending, stockbroking, ONDC-based shopping and account aggregators. The fundraise will also help PhonePe usher its next wave of growth within the UPI payments space including UPI Lite and Credit on UPI. Commenting on this development, Sameer Nigam, Founder and CEO of the fintech company said, ‘’We would like to thank Walmart, our majority investor, for their continued support of our long-term aspirations. We are excited about the next phase of our growth as we build new offerings for Indian consumers and merchants, along with enabling financial inclusion across the nation.’’ PhonePe was founded in 2015 by ex-Flipkart executives Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari and Burzin Engineer, and was acquired by the Sachin- and Binny Bansal-founded company in 2016. In 2018, Flipkart was acquired by Walmart, and PhonePe was part of the transaction as well. The digital payments company was Flipkart’s third major acquisition in the space after NGPay and FX Mart Pvt. Ltd at that point in time. In January this year, fintech major PhonePe domiciled in India from Singapore, its investors had to fork out Rs 8,000 crore. Around that time, PhonePe's co-founder and CEO Sameer Nigam, in a public statement noted that the move back to India was a correct decision as it was where the company first started and is focused on.
“I think for the mission PhonePe is on - which is solving for at-scale financial inclusion and digitisation - the move to India was right, India is where we started and where we are focused on. And to that end, for various reasons like being a highly regulated entity and wanting to eventually list here, the change of domicile to India for PhonePe as a business and as a company is the right answer,” he had noted.
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