News Update

PhonePe seeks $12 billion in funding from General Atlantic

• ByStartupStory     |    October 21, 2022

Unicorn payments and financial services According to people familiar with the situation, PhonePe is in talks to raise a new round of funding led by General Atlantic at a valuation of more than $12 billion, making the Walmart-backed startup the most valuable fintech in India.
“General Atlantic is likely to lead the round with a $450-$500 million investment,” one of the individuals cited above said.

Former Flipkart executives Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari, and Burzin Engineer founded PhonePe in 2015. The fintech has over 400 million registered users and is the market leader in UPI transactions. In terms of monthly UPI volumes, the company holds a 47 percent market share. According to a second source, this is not a pre-IPO round because the company’s public listing is at least 2-3 years away. PhonePe intends to use the funds raised to expand its ambitions to become a financial services super app, offering everything from payments to insurance to investments to commerce.

If the round is successful, PhonePe will join the ranks of Flipkart, which was acquired by Walmart, Paytm (which went public last year), Byju’s, and Swiggy as a decacorn, or a startup valued at more than $10 billion. PhonePe’s valuation will also exceed that of Razorpay, the digital payments and neobanking unicorn, which was last valued at around $7.5 billion. It will also be a rare instance of a late-stage round during a startup funding winter in which investors are signing smaller cheques due to a deteriorating macro environment. Flipkart valued PhonePe at $5.5 billion when it spun it off into a separate entity. Flipkart had invested $700 million at the time.

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