Flipkart plans to infuse $500 million funding in PhonePe

Flipkart ready to take on Paytm.

Flipkart, online retail major has committed $500 million to PhonePe, its payment arm. This move comes as an effort to take on Paytm, its Noida-based rival. The first tranche of $180-200 million is expected to come in by December-January, according to Sameer Nigam, PhonePe’s chief executive.

Salient points of the story:

• This new kitty adds to Flipkart’s $75-million infusion into PhonePe since the acquisition.
• Nigam said the funding will be used to get into the offline organised market in a big way.
• The fund will be used to get into the offline organised market in a big way.
• The fund will also get used to experiment in the offline space for mid to small merchants’ segment. It would be used to further strengthen the technology team, which currently contributes to 50 per cent of the workforce of PhonePe. It adds more categories in the mobile application.
• The company expects to achieve 25 billion digital payment transactions by next year. “A lot of our investment and energy will go into scaling up the technology teams and platform,” he said.
• Nigam said while PhonePe was open to acquisition to increase team capability, it was not in talks with anyone.

“We ‘ve reached the stage where we have a different biggest usecase every month. Last month, it was ecommerce because of sales on Flipkart, Jabong and Myntra. The month before that, the biggest usecase was the Jio recharge campaign. In some months, it is bill payments, and some months are P2P, especially on days such as Raksha Bandhan and Diwali,” Nigam said.

Excerpt from ‘The Economic Times’