Flipkart infuses ~5.18 billion fresh capital into PhonePe

Flipkart-owned payments app PhonePe has received a fresh funding of ~5.18 billion (approx $79.6 million) from its parent company as it looks to take on global giants such as Google and WhatsApp in the fast-growing digital payments space in India.

The fund infusion is the first one since Flipkart announced that it would invest $500 million in PhonePe in October last year. At the time, Flipkart had already invested around ~4.4 billion in the digital payments company since its acquisition

in April 2016.

The infusion in PhonePe was made by Singapore-based Flipkart Payments through the allocation of 2.4 million equity shares on March 19, according to

documents filed with the Registrar of Companies which was sourced through Paper.vc.

PhonePe claims that it is India’s leading app for making payments through the Unified Payment Interface (UPI), with little over a quarter of all UPI transactions by value being processed by it. The company also claims that the average transaction value on its platform is ~1,820. While India’s digital payments space saw a boom post the government’s demonetisation exercise in November 2016, more recently, the space has seen the entry of global giants such as Google and WhatsApp. Both companies have build payment solutions on top of the UPI platform.

The entry of cash-flush rivals from the US has put Indian payment firms on the defensive.