In a nation in which previous payment systems sought relief from currency instability and unpredictability, automated teller machines (ATMs) and debit cards did provide a degree of alleviation. But, using these cards for in-store purchases? That was still a challenge. Enter Pine Labs, a game-changer in the payment industry. Pine Labs, founded on the vision of making merchant transactions easy, changed the playing field by offering the market-leading point-of-sale (PoS) solutions.
The company has today a customer base of over 70,000 retail stores in India, working with renowned names such as Marks Spencer, Pantaloons, and Westside. Its success story achieved a turning point in January 2020, when Pine Labs achieved the unicorn, with the strategic investment of Mastercard, a guest shot for the achievement of the unicorn as an Indian startup in 2020. Through small beginnings to the title of an industry’s leader, Pine Labs is changing the merchant payment solutions scenario in India.
Pine Labs Highlights
| Attribute | Details |
| Startup Name | Pine Labs |
| Headquarters | Noida, India |
| Sector | Fintech |
| Founders | Lokvir Kapoor, Rajul Garg, Tarun Upadhyay |
| Founded | 1998 |
| Valuation | $5+ billion |
| Website | pinelabs.com |
About Pine Labs
Pine Labs, founded in 1998, is changing the landscape of the Indian merchant industry, by beautifully blending technology and financial services. Through its unique PoS machines Pine Labs digital payments journey enables merchants to maximize revenue and reduce costs, simplify management, and minimize risks. It is an integrated, end-to-end architecture, which helps increase revenue, simplify retail transactions, and provide businesses with information that can be used to improve the customer experience.
Serving over 100,000 merchants across India and several Asian countries, Pine Labs is powering over 350,000 PoS devices in 3,700 towns across India alone. Its cloud-based, platform, the heart of the growth unlock, because it provides the route for seamless, efficient and future-proof ecosystem. Whatever the scale of your business, from a single retail shop to a big corporation, Pine Labs is the preferred partner in growing your business, reaching new (and smarter) ways of reaching customers.
Pine Labs Business and Revenue Model
For more than 20 years Pine Labs has been the engine of the merchant ecosystem, enabling merchants to sell more, grow faster, smarter and become more efficient with a smooth workflow. Pine Labs digital payments journey harnesses the potential of technology and deep sector knowledge to address the needs of merchants of all sizes enabling them to thrive in a dynamic global marketplace.
Pine Labs, to fit any merchant, transformed the merchant payment solutions through next-generation cloud-based point-of-sale (PoS) solutions that can increase customer interaction at the checkout. It is still a leading force in fintech to reshape payment technology and still plays an important role in digital economy.
As one of the longest-standing Indian fintech company innovators, Pine Labs thrives on the sale of its PoS devices and earns commissions from its value-added services. In addition, the company makes income from fixed deposit and open investment, which will maintain their growth and fintech innovation in India in a sustained manner.
Pine Labs Founders and Team
Pine Labs, a pioneer in fintech, achieved its success thanks to the vision and perseverance of its three brilliant founders—Lokvir Kapoor, Rajul Garg and Tarun Upadhyay—who built up this Noida-headquartered Indian fintech company.
Lokvir Kapoor
As an IIT Kanpur BTech graduate in Mechanical Engineering, Kapoor has also substantially developed his business skills while pursuing an MBA from IIM Bangalore. His career started at Schlumberger where he quickly established success in financial management and business development in the worldwide markets. In 1998, he co-invented Pine Labs, taking it into a new epoch of digital payment paradigm.
Rajul Garg
Pine Labs’ co-founder and former CEO, Rajul Garg, an energetic entrepreneur and technology pioneer, made a key contribution. Equipped with a BTech in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Garg’s professional life so far has been comprised, among others, of co-founding GlobalLogic and Sunstone Eduversity. He is an adept scale-up entrepreneur who is now co-founder and partner managing Leo Capital Holdings. His business background is a good example of the drive of promoting technology and education innovations.
Tarun Upadhyay
Tarun Upadhyay, Co-founder and former CTO of Pine Labs, has a joint MSc. in Mathematics and Computer Applications from IIT Delhi. He is a serial entrepreneur and co-founded companies like GlobalLogic, hCentive and Pine Labs (Previously Gallop.ai where he was the CEO)technical expertise of upadhyay is crucial in bringing technology solutions closer to Pine Labs.
Amrish Rau
With the guidance of the CEO Amrish Rau, who joined in March 2020, Pine Labs has become an enterprise of Indian fintech company with a workforce of 1001-5000 employees, offering state-of-the-art payment solutions around the world.
The story of Pine Labs digital payments journey is a case study in vision, fintech innovation in India, and digital payment revolution driven by leadership.
Pine Labs Key Features
Pine Labs is one of the biggest fintechs providing innovative solutions to businesses in different industries.
Comprehensive Payment Solutions: Pine Labs provides a wide array of payment products and servic es to online and offline retailers, including contactless, EMV and mobile payment technologies, etc.
POS Systems: As regards the amount of funding provided by Pine Labs, the Singapore registered firm has already closed 13 funding rounds for a total of $1.2 Billion.
Financing Services: Pine Labs provides “”Pay Later”” facilities to consumers, by which they can purchase, and then pay for, products in instalments and thereby to the customer and the merchant.
Merchant Lending Program: The firm offers working capital loans and custom financial products to aid smalland medium enterprises (SMEs) growth.
Integration with Digital Wallets and Banks: Pine Labs is integrated with the biggest digital wallets, banks, and financial institutions and enables durable and secure transactions on a wide array of platforms.
Pine Labs is changing the model of business activities by providing innovative payment and financing solutions that facilitate growth in the digital economy.
Pine Labs Competitors
Pine Labs, as one of the leading fintech companies, is challenged by global and local competitors who provide creative solutions for payment, financial and other services. Here’s a brief look at its key competitors:
- PayPal: One of the world’s leading service providers for the digital money world, PayPal provides a secure, simple to use settlement network. With its broad adoption and capabilities such as Buy Now, Pay Later and international payment, Pine Labs is being challenged in the market for online and cross-border payments.
- PayKun: This India-focused challenger provides an inexpensive point of sale (POS) solutions payment channel for small medium enterprises (SMEs). Because of its low price and its attention to small to medium sized local businesses, it is a good player in the Indian market.
- Stripe Connect: The development of Stripes Connect that is well suited to custom payment solutions is characterized by having developer-friendly APIs. Pine Labs is characterized with advanced scale of managing marketplaces as well subscription services on one hand and relative competitive differentiation in terms of technology over the rest of the competition.
- Payoneer: With respect to cross-border payments Payoneer services global freelancers, e-commerce sellers, and companies. Its emphasis on cross-border transactions, and so multi-currency accounts, is comparable to Pine Labs’ efforts at a global scale.
All competition has its own strengths, that spurs innovation and keeps the Indian fintech company alive.
Pine Labs Awards and Achievements
Pine Labs have in fact a huge collection of awards amassed over the course of its existence.
- Award-Winning Innovation: According to Pine Lab’s novel solution, which obtained the India Fintech Forum’s IFTA 2021 Award of “Most Innovative Fintech product” in November of 2021, it has become a new benchmark for fintech innovation in India.
- Marketing Excellence: The Pine Labs AllTap #WarriorsAtWork campaign went beyond creating an interesting moment, winning gold in the “Best Fintech Marketing Campaign” category at CMO Asia, 2021, demonstrating that innovation and planning go hand in hand in this intensely competitive world.
- Recognition at India Digital Awards: Pine Labs was awarded the “Best Digital API” (presented by the Internet and Mobile Association of India, IAMAI) in the Best Technology Solutions category within the 11th India Digital Awards.
- Fintech Excellence Award: This is the case, wherein Pine Labs won the Best Payment Technology/Solution Provider award in the 10th India Digital Awards in February 2020, recognizing its contribution to the payment solutions domain innovation.
- Sanjeev Kumar’s Achievement: In December 2019, Sanjiv Kumar, the Chief Technology Officer of Pine Labs, received the Change Agents 2019 Award at CIO500 Conclave Awards 2019. This award presentation Enterprise IT World acknowledged his exceptional leadership and change impact on the IT industry.
- Pine Labs’ Recognition: In October 2019, Pine Labs was awarded the Indian Merchant Platform Customer Value Leadership Award at the Frost & Sullivan – 2019 India Best Practices Awards. This honor recognized the outstanding contributions of the company for a more positive customer experience and for radical innovations in the context of merchant payment.
Future plans for Pine Labs
Pine Labs is about to come out on top in the market for digital retail payments, and so the next exciting chapter will begin in the growth story of Pine Labs. To achieve the next generation of customer experiences, the company is turning its sights now to expanding beyond markets and into new product categories. And, it’s not stopping there—an Initial Public Offering (IPO) is on the horizon, with estimates valuing the company at around $1 billion in the next 18 months.
Pine Labs has already engaged Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs as strategic advisors to prepare it for this big step. Aiming for a big step on the digital ground, the company is aiming for $4-5 billion/month in transaction volume by year 2, with contactless payments technology being 20% of overall volume.
But that’s not all. Pine Labs is also forecasting a massive surge in total payment volume (TPV), aiming to increase it four-fold to $100 billion, up from $23 billion. This position Pine Labs in line to become one of the big players in the world, such as Square Inc., a major US-based financial and merchant services provider that achieved a TPV of $84.65 billion in the last financial year.
Visioning Pine Labs global expansion and a very near listing on the NASDAQ, Pine Labs is poised to become a very big deal. The future of contactless payments technology has never looked brighter!
Conclusion
Pine Labs continues to be a respected leader in navigating a constantly changing retail environment, by providing merchants with innovative technology and financial products. Pine Labs re-engineers the merchant experience by simplifying last-mile activities and opening doors to new revenue streams.
Powered by a platform that is both robust and cloud-based, and with over 100,000 merchants in India and Asia boarding it, the company excels at making the technology-commerce gap disappear.
And as Pine Labs continues to define the retail of the future, its efforts toward cost optimization, risk mitigation, and customer success will continue to center on its merchants. Together, across the board they are seeking the difficulties which retailers are being asked to cope with (and are in fact doing exactly that), whilst transforming the industry into a better connected, more positive world to be in. Pine Labs is not just selling to merchants but empowering them for success.
Frequenlty Asked Questions
What is Pine Labs’ hardware ID?
Your hardware ID is a unique identifier specific to your device. Submitting this ID is mandatory for obtaining and activating your license, and for optimal operation.
How does Pine Labs generate revenue?
Pine Labs generates revenue from sales and leasing of its products, from services it delivers and from interest earned on fixed deposits and working capital.
What is the valuation of Pine Labs?
Pine Labs has given a valuation of over $5 billion as of late.
How are the acquisitions of Pine Labs?
Based on Pine Labs’ acquisitions history we can infer that at least already Pine Labs has 5 companies under its belt with 3 having been purchased in 2022.
How is the the funding of Pine Labs?
As regards the amount of funding provided by Pine Labs, the Singapore registered firm has already closed 13 funding rounds for a total of $1.2 Billion.
