FinTech Unicorn Pine Labs May Acquire Bangalore-based Setu

FinTech unicorn Pine Labs is in advanced negotiations to acquire API infrastructure company Setu for more than $70 million, Live Mint and others reported, citing sources with insider information.

Headquartered in Noida, India, Pine Labs is an Indian merchant platform founded in 1998 by Lokvir Kapoor, Rajul Garg and Tarun Upadhyay that provides financing and last-mile retail transaction technology. The company uses a single point-of-sale (POS) terminal to process monthly installments.

See also: Digital Payments Startup Pine Labs Files for $500M IPO at Valuation as High as $7B

Setu, founded by Sahil Kini and Nikhil Kumar in 2018, offers open APIs across four categories — bills, savings, credit and payments. Setu is among the technology service providers in the account aggregator space assisting people with securely sharing personal financial data with banks.

Setu raised a total of $18.5 million in funding to date, with $3.5 million from Lightspeed India Partners and Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund and $15 million from Falcon Edge and existing investors.

Read more: State Bank of India Backs Pine Labs with $20M

Pine Labs is prepping for a U.S. initial public offering (IPO) and counts Sequoia as its biggest investor as it looks to diversify and expand into new growth areas. One area it’s working to scale is its POS product Plural for online commerce payments, according to Live Mint.

The company works with over 70 brands in India and is expanding its buy now, pay later (BNPL) business across India and Southeast Asia. It moved into the consumer payment space with a $45-million acquisition of Fave. Last month, Pine Labs raised $20 million from State Bank of India.

Setu posted an operating revenue of Rs 3.31 crore ($442,650) last year, up from Rs 144 ($1.93) in 2020, with losses of Rs 19 crore ($2.5 million) versus Rs 7 crore ($936,098) a year ago, according to Live Mint.