Flipkart pumps in Rs 518 crore in payments unit PhonePe

By

Maverick Martins

Published
Mar 26, 2018

Indian e-commerce major Flipkart has pumped in an additional Rs 518 crore (approx $ 80 million) into its digital payments platform Phonepe, according to the company’s latest documents filed with the Registrar of Companies (RoC).
 

Flipkart last year in October had made one of its biggest investments in the digital payments space with capital infusion of $500 million (approx Rs 3243 crore) in PhonePe to scale up its up technology, reach and offerings.
 
Singapore-based Flipkart Payments Pvt Ltd was allocated shares of PhonePe for Rs 2,110 per share, as per the documents in RoC sourced from business research platform Paper.vc by Times of India. The latest capital infusion in PhonePe took place on March 19.

“PhonePe is a critical part of our overall strategy at Flipkart to build a comprehensive ecosystem for our customers. We’re fully committed to make PhonePe the most preferred digital payments app in India,” Binny Bansal, group CEO, Flipkart had said in a statement earlier.
 
With the latest capital infusion, Phonepe is looking to scale up its operations by doubling its workforce in the technology and business sectors. The company is hiring for its engineering, business development, design, and analytics roles, among others.
 
“As a digital payments company, we aim to serve 100% of the population and hence it is imperative that we have strong diversity in the team, all this while maintaining a high hiring bar. We are looking to hire across cities in India as we expand our office network to Mumbai, Pune, Delhi and other metro cities,” said Rahul Chari, co-founder and CTO, PhonePe.
 
PhonePe competes with the likes of Amazon Pay, Paytm and Mobikwik in India’s digital market. Flipkart’s rival, Amazon, has also been ramping up efforts to strengthen its digital payments platform, Amazon Pay.