Pine Labs picks up third stake in Indian payment startup Setu

Pine Labs' third acquisition in 2022 is the third in 2022. In April, it picked up a majority stake in payments solution provider Mosambee and in February in Mumbai-based online payments startup Qfix.

Pine Labs also offers buy now, pay later, invoice management, gifting solutions and e-commerce solutions to merchants, as well as point-of- sales PoS services.

In March, the company raised $50 million in funding from Vitruvian Partners, a London-based international investment firm, just a month after raising $150 million from Alpha Wave Ventures.

Setu was founded in Bengaluru and was launched in 2018 by Sahil Kini and Nikhil Kumar.

Setu will be an incredible addition to the Pine Labs platform for a number of reasons. The embedded finance market value is expected to exceed $138 billion by the year 2026, as APIs are intensifying the competitive Fintech landscape, according to Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau, who said in a statement.

Setu has an interface for account aggregators, an open network for digital commerce and an open credit enablement network frame. It competes with the likes of M 2 P Fintech, Signzy and Decentro in the API infrastructure business.

The company reported operating revenues of 33.1 million rupees $423,500 in fiscal 2021, compared with zero the previous year, while Setu is yet to file its annual financial statement for fiscal 2022.

Pine Labs, currently valued at $5 billion, is contemplating raising $500 million in an initial public offering in the U.S. at a valuation of $6 billion to $7 billion, according to media reports.

Nikkei owns a majority stake in the company.