CEO of Pine Labs Amrish Rau The deal was significant, without commenting on the size of the deal.
ET reported on February 2 that Pine Labs was looking to acquire Bridge in a cash and equity deal in the range of $70-$100 million.
Post-acquisition, Setu will operate independently, maintain its brand entity and continue to serve its existing merchants.
Pine Labs, through the acquisition, will foray into embedded finance, and gain access to Setu’s API infrastructure stack to expand new services to its online merchant partners.
In October 2021, Pine Labs said it would enter the payment gateway segment for online merchants and new-age direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands with the launch of Plural, which provides payment services to merchants.
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Plurals has already achieved Rs 2,000 crore in payment processing value since its launch.
Rau said Pine Labs can provide
such as identity management and embedded fixed deposits and allows traders to issue a line of credit to their customer partners with this acquisition.
“Payment transactions are becoming more and more embedded. In the future, data and identity will also be distributed frictionlessly. That’s where Setu has done some tremendous work. If we can provide embedded finance and open up our merchants.” The combination between Setu and Plural will be crucial if APIs can provide the infrastructure,” Rau said.
The acquisition comes at a time when Pine Labs is looking to list in the US market.
ET reported on January 11, Citing sources, that the company had filed for a $500 million ‘confidential’ initial public offering (IPO) with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
However, with the current market downturn, Pine Labs has taken a wait-and-see approach to its listing plans, sources told ET earlier.
Rau declined to comment on Pine Labs’ listing plans.
Established in 2018 by Sahil Kinik And Nikhil Kumar, Setu provides API infrastructure that allows banks and other financial institutions to launch financial services on its platform. It allows companies to break through the traditional methods of loan appraisal such as SMS reading, screen scraping and file uploads.
So far, Setu has raised approximately $18.5 million from Falcon Edge, Lightspeed Venture Partners US, Lightspeed India Partners and Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund.
“We believe that the democratization of technology will lead to better results in making financial products accessible to all. Therefore, we have our APIs open to the developer community. Pine Labs merchants and issuers,” said Kinney, CEO of Setu. Our API integration prowess along with our AP network will help us achieve great results in managing personal finance, monitoring loans to predict default rates, and credit underwriting.”
Nandan Nilekani, Co-Founder and Chairman of Infosys Technologies Ltd.
earlier this year,
Pine Labs acquires Mumbai-based online payments startup Qfix Infocomm, and acquired a majority stake in payment solutions provider Mosambi. The investment was made to increase its presence in the unorganized retailer segment including kirana stores.
Last year, it bought Kuala Lumpur-based payments and discovery platform Fave in an all-cash deal for $45 million and was planning to foray into the consumer payments space in India.