Thu. Mar 28th, 2024
paytm

India’s leading mobile payment service provider firm has raised ₹9000 crores ($1.4 Bilion) from Japan’s Softbank. After the latest funding round, Paytm is now valued at over ₹51,800 crores ($8 billion).

The speculations were rift since a long time that Paytm and Softbank were in talks for a big funding round. Recently, when the news of secondary investors selling their stock to Alibaba broke, the rumours came out hinting at a prompt deal between the two. This news has now confirmed all the developments.

The amount invested by Softbank is the largest amount invested in an Indian digital company by a single investor. After this investment, SoftBank will be a significant stakeholder in Noida based firm, along with China’s Alibaba.

Paytm has spoken about its plans to invest over ₹10,000 crores in next 2 years to bring over 50 crore users to its platform. Currently, Paytm has around 22 million users. Recently, it also got final approval from RBI to operate the payment bank, which will start its operations next week.

With this investment, Softbank now owns 20% of primary and secondary shares in One97 Communications, parent company of Paytm. Softbank will also appoint one director on the board of Paytm.

Speaking on the development, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CEO – Paytm stated his delight over partnering with Softbank and stated that the partnership will enable Paytm to reach half a billion users by 2020.

In his statement, Masayoshi Son, Chairman & CEO, SoftBank Group Corp told that the government’s initiative of digital India is going to benefit a lot of Indians. With partnership with paytm, Softbank will also work towards digitising lives of hundreds of million people across the country.

SoftBank has been a substantial investor with its investments in companies like Ola, Snapdeal, InMobi, Housing and Oyo.

By Prithviraj Singh Chauhan

Part time journalist, full-time observer. Editor-in-Chief at The Indian Wire. I cover updates related to business and startups.