Baron Funds had valued Pine Labs at $5.3 billion in September last year. On January 4, ET reported that Invesco had cut the valuation of Pine Labs to $3.9 billion as of October 31.
The Noida-headquartered payments company, which mainly deploys point-of-sales (PoS) solutions at merchant outlets, had last raised $150 million from Alpha Wave back in 2022. It was valued at $5 billion post that round. Currently, Invesco owns around 2.8% of Pine Labs and Baron Funds owns around 1.3% in the company. Peak XV Partners, the original investor in the company, now owns around 20.6%, data from Tracxn shows.
On January 25, ET had reported that Fidelity, another American fund manager, had marked down the fair value of Pine Labs to $3 billion from $4.7 billion as of August 31, 2023.
Pine Labs chief executive Amrish Rau did not comment on the development.
Crossover funds, which invest in both publicly listed companies and privately held firms, review the valuations of their holdings from time to time. These calculations are often made to reflect the valuation changes in the private firms’ publicly listed counterparts.
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Pine Labs, which was founded in 1998, has expanded its scope of operations over the last four to five years. From offering card payments at large retail outlets, it currently offers all forms of digital payments at merchant outlets, online payments for ecommerce transactions, and also processes pay-later solutions during transaction checkout.Between 2019 and 2022, Pine Labs acquired gift card solutions firm Qwikcilver, Malaysian payment firm Fave and PoS payments company Mosambee. In FY23, it reported a total revenue of Rs 1,588 crore and a net loss of Rs 227 crore, according to data from Tracxn. It competes with banks and other fintechs like Paytm, Ezetap (owned by Razorpay), Mswipe and Innoviti Payments.
