IPO-bound Pine Labs acquires Qfix as it adds more thrust to online payments foray

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Founded in 2015-16, Qfix enables large-scale commerce within communities on a single platform. For instance, the platform is used by over 5,000 educational institutes for fee management, fee collection, communication, and more.

"Qfix's innovations through their smart invoicing, workflow management, and billing tools would help offer a complete merchant payments and commerce platform through Plural," said Amrish Rau, CEO, Pine Labs.

In October last year, Pine Labs launched Plural, largely targeting online sellers, including direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands. With Plural Gateway, small businesses could accept online payments, honour loyalty programs, and run 'Buy Now, Pay Later' schemes. This signaled the shift in Pine Labs' earlier focus of primarily helping merchants with offline, in-store payments.

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In recent years, two acquisitions have helped in this regard. In 2019, Pine Labs spent $110 million on Qwikcilver — an end-to-end gifting startup. Last year, it picked up Malaysia-based Fave — a cashback and rewards platform — for $45 million with an aim to offer loyalty-based payments using UPI.

As per a Mint report, Pine Labs is looking to strengthen its online stack with the acquisition of Setu — an API and software provider for businesses to handle onboarding, payments, deposits, lending, and more.

These developments follow a record year of financing for Pine Labs, which raised over $600 million across multiple rounds separately led by investors such as Fidelity, Invesco, SBI, and more. The fintech company is currently valued at $3 billion.

According to a Bloomberg report, Pine Labs has confidentially filed its IPO papers with US Securities and Exchange Commission, seeking to raise $500 million at a valuation of about $5.5 billion to $7 billion.