India’s PhonePe Valued at $12B After $100M Fundraise

India’s PhonePe is closer to realizing its super app ambitions after raising $100 million.

The Walmart-backed payments platform announced the round Tuesday (Feb. 14), which values it at $12 billion and will allow it to launch new services including lending, stock brokering and eCommerce via India’s Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC).

“PhonePe started its latest fundraise with a target of raising up to $1 billion in capital, post its domicile shift to India,” the announcement said.

“With this second tranche, it has already raised $450 million within six weeks from leading investors. The company expects further investments from leading global, as well as prominent high net worth Indian investors in due course.”

PhonePe founder and CEO Sameer Nigam in December alluded to the company’s super app plans.

“We are looking forward to the next phase of our growth as we invest in new businesses — like insurance, wealth management and lending, while also enabling the next wave of growth for UPI payments in India,” he said. “This will help propel our vision to provide billions of Indians with financial inclusion.”

PhonePe was founded in 2015, and was in 2016 acquired by Flipkart, an India-based eCommerce platform that is itself owned by Walmart, giving more than 35 million merchants in India a way to digitize their checkout process.

The companies severed their relationship last year, a mutual decision the two firms said would allow both businesses to grow independently. Walmart remains the majority shareholder for both Flipkart and PhonePe.

Earlier this month, PhonePe announced it was now enabling cross-border Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payments in select countries, meaning customers can India can pay foreign merchants instantly when traveling abroad.

“I am sure this launch will prove to be a game-changer and will completely transform the way Indians traveling overseas pay at merchant outlets abroad,” PhonePe Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Rahul Chari said in the announcement.

Launched in 2016, UPI is the National Payments Corporation of India’s (NPCI’s) flagship payments platform. Having crossed the 1 billion transaction mark in October 2019, it has grown since then, with NPCI announcing last month that it is widening access to the UPI to nonresident Indians in several countries.

“Over the past six years, all over India, we have been lucky to experience the UPI payments revolution transforming our daily lives,” Chari said in the post. “UPI International is the first major step in letting the rest of the world experience UPI too.”