PhonePe Raises $200 Million From Former Parent Walmart

India’s FinTech platform PhonePe has raised another $200 million, this time with the help of Walmart.

The funding, announced Friday (March 17), comes one month after the company announced it had raised $100 million in a round that valued it at $12 billion.

This new funding keeps PhonePe’s valuation at that level and is part of its ongoing effort to raise up to $1 billion in capital, the company said in a news release.

“We would like to thank Walmart, our majority investor, for their continued support of our long-term aspirations,” said Sameer Nigam, PhonePe’s founder and CEO. “We are excited about the next phase of our growth as we build new offerings for Indian consumers and merchants, along with enabling financial inclusion across the nation.”

PhonePe was founded in 2015, and was acquired by Flipkart, an India-based eCommerce platform that is itself owned by Walmart, the following year.

The two Indian companies severed their relationship last year, a mutual decision the firms said would allow their businesses to expand independently. As PYMNTS noted last month, Walmart remains the majority shareholder for both companies.

The company says it plans to use the new funding to build and scale into new offerings such as insurance, wealth management, lending and stockbroking, while also helping it expand its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payment program in India.

PhonePe announced in February it was enabling cross-border UPI payments in select countries, letting customers in India pay foreign merchants instantly when traveling abroad.

“I am sure this launch will prove to be a game-changer and will completely transform the way Indians traveling overseas pay at merchant outlets abroad,” PhonePe Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Rahul Chari said in the announcement.

As PYMNTS has noted, merchants who want to expand into India need to pay attention to the fact that payments are relatively new, however, and are thus largely unregulated in the country.

“Additionally, while the Indian government allows foreign companies to own and operate business-to-business (B2B) eCommerce marketplaces, these companies may not distribute their own inventory,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this month.

These marketplaces are also not permitted to influence product prices, putting limits on newcomers’ ability to make a profit after cross-border fees are taken into account.

PYMNTS research shows that India’s eCommerce market is one of the fastest-growing in the world, with yearly online sales exceeding $67 billion in 2021.

Almost 9 in every 10 Indian adults use some form of mobile wallet, and 833.7 million consumers are connected to the internet. Foreign firms such as Amazon and eBay have a major presence in India as well, letting local merchants market their products both domestically and abroad.