Pine Labs, an Indian merchant-commerce startup backed by PayPal and Mastercard, is going public this week at a valuation about 40% lower than its last private round — even as it doubles down on plans to take its fintech platform global.
The Gurugram-based fintech has set a price band of ₹210–₹221 (about $2.00–$2.50) a share, valuing the company at approximately ₹254 billion (around $2.9 billion) at the upper end of the range. This represents a decline of about 40% from its last private valuation of over $5 billion in 2022.
Pine Labs has also reduced its primary offering by 20% to ₹20.8 billion (approximately $234 million) from ₹26 billion in its draft prospectus filed in June, while the offer for sale has been cut by 44% to 82.3 million shares from 148 million shares planned earlier.
Existing investors, including Peak XV Partners, Temasek Holdings, PayPal, and Mastercard, are among those selling part of their holdings in the offering.
Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau told reporters at a press briefing on Monday that investors had chosen to retain a larger portion of their shareholdings, which resulted in a smaller offer for sale.
“When it came to the pricing of this IPO, we were very clear that we want to continue to garner goodwill, and we wanted to get everybody’s support when we go out with this pricing for this IPO,” he said. “We believe we were able to maintain that because, at the end of the day, it takes a village to come together to create a successful IPO.”
Founded in 1998, Pine Labs initially focused on deploying point-of-sale terminals for merchants but has since evolved beyond payment acceptance to enable bill payments through platforms such as Amazon Pay and CRED, and to facilitate account-aggregator-based transactions, among a broader suite of payment, transaction, and acquiring services.
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