BharatPe joins the unicorn club, with a valuation of $2.85 billion

Business News: About a month after receiving a banking license with Centrum as a partner, Tiger Global invests enough money into BharatPe to turn it into a unicorn with valuation of $2.85 billion

BharatPe, a provider of merchant payments and banking services, is the most recent unicorn to join the fray. The three-year-old company was valued at $2.85 billion after raising $370 million in a Series E transaction headed by Tiger Global.

This is nearly a threefold rise above $900 million valuation assigned to the company in February’s $108 million Series D financing.

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The financing is split between primary and secondary sources. The core component is worth $350 million, while the secondary one is worth $20 million. In the secondary component, all employees with ESOPs have been awarded full liquidity.

Existing investors such as Coatue Management, Insight Partners, Sequoia Growth, Ribbit Capital, and Amplo joined the investment round alongside Tiger Global, Dragoneer, and Steadfast.

The management of BharatPe has also been reshuffled. Ashneer Grover, the company’s founder, will step down as CEO and take on the responsibilities of a managing director. Meanwhile, former Group President Suhail Sameer will be the company’s new CEO and a member of the board of directors.

Sameer will be in charge of the company’s monetization, lending, and recent push into banking. Meanwhile, Grover will be in charge of the company’s strategy, technology, and product functions, as well as capital raising.

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Ashneer Grover, co-founder and Managing Director said, “We now have US$ 0.5 billion cash on books and are extremely well capitalized to deliver on our mandate to build India’s first truly Digital Bank. Rarely does one witness the original thesis play out without any pivot. Bharatpe will remain maniacally focused on lending as the core business and small merchants as our primary target segment.”

Suhail Sameer, the company’s newly appointed CEO, stated that they plan to scale the company 10X from here on out.

Ashneer Grover and Shashvat Nakrani co-founded BharatPe in 2018 and it now has a presence in over 140 locations. It has approved the release of Rs 1,800 crore in merchant loans so far. Its POS company processes around Rs 1,400 crore in payments every month.

In conjunction with Centrum Financial Services, it gained in-principle clearance from the Reserve Bank of India to launch a small finance bank last month.