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Startup Deep Dive : Pine Labs — it listed 40% below its 2022 valuation, then popped 14%

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Pine Labs.

Pine Labs makes the machines that take your card at more than 150,000 stores across India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and it has been doing this since 1998. Yet when the company finally listed on the NSE and BSE on 14 November 2025, it did so at a price that valued it near $2.9 billion, roughly 40% below the $5 billion investors had put on it in March 2022 — even as the stock jumped 14% on its first day of trade.

That contradiction — a company old enough to have survived three technology cycles, still growing revenue at nearly 30% a year, listing below its last private price — is the whole Pine Labs story in miniature. This is what a 27-year-old payments business looks like when it finally has to show its books to public shareholders instead of venture capitalists.

Quick facts

Company Pine Labs Limited (NSE, BSE: PINELABS)
Founded 1998, as a petroleum-retail automation company; pivoted to general merchant point-of-sale in 2003
Founder(s) Lokvir Kapoor, Rajul Garg and Tarun Upadhyay; led since March 2020 by chief executive B. Amrish Rau
Businesses POS terminals and digital checkout, merchant EMI/BNPL enablement, gift-card and prepaid issuing (via Qwikcilver), online payment gateway
Latest FY revenue ₹2,274.3 crore (about $237 million) in FY25, year ended 31 March 2025, as per its DRHP
Latest FY profit/loss Net loss of ₹145.5 crore in FY25, narrowed 57% from FY24’s loss, as per the DRHP
Listed NSE and BSE, 14 November 2025 (issue price ₹221 a share)
Market value / last valuation IPO priced the company near $2.9 billion; closed its first trading day near ₹28,900 crore (about $3.3 billion) market capitalisation
Key shareholders Peak XV Partners (20.35%), Temasek (7.1%), PayPal (6%), Actis (5.78%), Mastercard (5.24%), post-IPO

What they do

Pine Labs builds the plumbing that sits between a shopper’s card, wallet or EMI request and a merchant’s bank account. A small kirana store rents an Android-based Pine Labs terminal to accept cards and UPI; a large retail chain uses its software to break a bill into no-cost EMI at checkout; a mall, airline or restaurant chain uses its Qwikcilver-built rails to issue and redeem gift cards; and an online store plugs into its payment gateway to accept the same range of instruments on the web. The company says its technology reaches more than 150,000 merchants and powers upward of 350,000 point-of-sale terminals across India, Malaysia, the UAE and other markets, working with banks and financial institutions that actually hold the merchant relationship and the settlement risk.

The origin

Pine Labs was founded in 1998 by Lokvir Kapoor, Rajul Garg — an IIT Delhi graduate who ran the company in its early years — and Tarun Upadhyay. The founding insight had nothing to do with cards: India’s oil marketing companies needed automated billing and loyalty systems at petrol pumps, and nobody was building that software well. Pine Labs built it. The founders then noticed that the friction they were solving at fuel stations — slow, error-prone, cash-heavy billing — existed at every merchant counter in the country. In 2003 they launched their first stand-alone point-of-sale device so any retailer, not just a petrol pump, could accept a card instead of cash, and the company’s centre of gravity shifted from petroleum automation to broad-based merchant payments.

The struggle years

Pine Labs’ history is not a straight line up. Some of its lowest points, in order:

In April and May 2020, when India’s COVID-19 lockdown shut most physical retail, small and mid-sized merchants stopped transacting and Pine Labs’ core terminal business went quiet before contactless and UPI use recovered later that year. In August 2021, an unauthorised actor breached Pine Labs’ systems and copied billing data, card numbers and other sensitive customer information; the company reported the incident to the Reserve Bank of India and to CERT-In, a direct hit to the trust a payments processor depends on. In January 2022, Pine Labs confidentially filed for a US listing targeting roughly $500 million, then walked away from that route entirely and stayed private for nearly four more years while its losses widened — the net loss grew from ₹265.2 crore in FY23 to ₹341.9 crore in FY24, even as revenue kept growing. Through 2023, as the broader Indian startup funding market seized up, Pine Labs cut jobs across its product, engineering and design teams, according to employee accounts on Glassdoor and Grapevine; the company has not disclosed exact numbers. And through 2022 to 2025 its own valuation nearly halved, from $5 billion when Alpha Wave invested in 2022 to about $2.9 billion when the IPO was finally priced in November 2025, a roughly 40% cut reported independently by Reuters and TechCrunch. On top of all that, in 2024 Pine Labs had to legally dissolve its Singapore parent and merge it into the Indian operating entity — a reverse flip that needed a Singapore court’s approval in May 2024 and an Indian tribunal’s approval that August, an outbound merger structure no Singapore-incorporated company had completed before.

The turning point

The single event that reshaped Pine Labs’ business was the acquisition of Qwikcilver Solutions, the Bengaluru-based gift-card and prepaid-instruments company. Pine Labs signed the deal on 19 March 2019 and completed it a month later, on 19 April 2019, paying $110 million — by far its largest acquisition to that point, funded from internal cash plus support from existing investors. Before the deal, Pine Labs was substantially a device business: it made money selling and renting POS hardware, a line exposed to hardware cycles and one-time sales. Qwikcilver brought in relationships with more than 250 brands and 1,500 enterprise merchants issuing gift cards and prepaid instruments. Six years later, the business line built on those rails — reported in the DRHP as the “Issuing and Acquiring Platform” segment — generated ₹671.1 crore in FY25, about 30% of Pine Labs’ entire ₹2,274.3 crore consolidated revenue that year. A $110 million bet had grown into a recurring, higher-margin revenue stream worth several times that every single year.

The money behind it

Pine Labs has raised roughly $1.127 billion across 14 funding rounds over its life as a venture-backed company, according to CB Insights’ tally. The shape of that capital matters as much as the total. Temasek and PayPal put in $125 million in May 2018, the round that pushed Pine Labs past unicorn status and gave it two large, patient strategic shareholders; PayPal in particular later became one of the investors selling part of its stake in the 2025 IPO’s offer-for-sale. Mastercard invested an undisclosed sum in January 2020, a relationship that fed into Pine Labs’ card-network access for its EMI and issuing businesses. Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India), which had backed the company earlier, ended up its largest external shareholder, holding 20.35% at listing — enough follow-on conviction across multiple rounds to matter through the 2020 leadership change and the run-up to the IPO. Fidelity and BlackRock led a $325 million round in July 2021 at a $3.5 billion valuation, and Alpha Wave Global put in $150 million in 2022 at what became the company’s peak private valuation of $5 billion. None of that peak survived contact with public markets: Reuters and TechCrunch both reported the November 2025 IPO priced Pine Labs near $2.9 billion, before the stock’s first-day 14% gain lifted its market capitalisation to roughly ₹28,900 crore (about $3.3 billion).

How it makes money

Pine Labs runs a toll-booth model with two main streams. The first, its Digital Infrastructure and Transaction Platform, earns subscription fees from merchants and acquiring banks based on the number of devices or digital checkout points deployed, plus transaction-based fees — typically a fraction of a percent to about 2% of transaction value — on card payments, EMI conversions and online payments processed through its systems. Subscription revenue from its Digital Checkout Points alone made up 29% of consolidated revenue in the quarter ended June 2026. The second stream, Issuing and Acquiring, earns processing fees on the gift cards and prepaid instruments it distributes for brands, plus interest income on the float it holds for customers and “breakage income” from card balances that are never redeemed. The part most outside observers get wrong is assuming Pine Labs earns a fee on every transaction that crosses its network. It does not: its own DRHP disclosed that more than 80% of the transactions flowing through its platforms are UPI payments, which carry a zero merchant discount rate in India by regulation — meaning Pine Labs’ fastest-growing payment rail by volume contributes essentially nothing directly to revenue. The margin instead sits in device subscriptions, EMI and BNPL enablement fees paid by lending partners, card transactions, and the issuing business’s float and breakage income.

The numbers

Consolidated revenue and profit/loss over the three years covered in Pine Labs’ DRHP, in ₹ crore:

Fiscal year Revenue (₹ crore) Net profit/(loss) (₹ crore)
FY23 (year ended March 2023) 1,597.7 (265.2)
FY24 (year ended March 2024) 1,769.6 (341.9)
FY25 (year ended March 2025) 2,274.3 (145.5)

The trend since has kept turning: Pine Labs reported a consolidated net profit of ₹4.8 crore in the quarter ended June 2025 (Q1 FY26), ₹6.0 crore in the quarter ended December 2025 (Q2 FY26), and ₹19.6 crore on revenue of ₹736.9 crore in the quarter ended June 2026 (Q1 FY27) — a fourfold year-on-year jump in quarterly profit even as revenue grew about 20% in that same quarter.

Where the money comes from

By segment, Pine Labs’ Digital Infrastructure and Transaction Platform generated ₹1,603.2 crore of FY25’s ₹2,274.3 crore consolidated revenue, or about 70%; Issuing and Acquiring made up the remaining ₹671.1 crore, or roughly 30%. By geography, the business is still overwhelmingly Indian: in the quarter ended June 2026, international revenue from its operations across Southeast Asia, the UAE and other markets — 22 countries in total — was ₹114 crore, about 16% of the ₹737 crore consolidated quarterly revenue, though that international line grew 21% year-on-year, faster than the India business. The surprise, given Pine Labs is best known as a POS hardware brand, is how small a role one-time device sales now play: the growth in FY25 and beyond has come from subscription fees on installed Digital Checkout Points and from the issuing platform’s processing and float income, not from selling more machines.

The risks

Three risks stand out, two of them named in Pine Labs’ own DRHP. First, the UPI dependency problem described above: with over 80% of platform transactions on a zero-fee rail, continued growth in UPI’s share of India’s digital payments does not translate proportionally into Pine Labs’ revenue, and any future regulatory move to widen zero-fee mandates to other payment types would squeeze margins further. Second, customer concentration: the DRHP disclosed that Pine Labs’ top 10 customers accounted for 31.02% of its revenue, and while its single largest customer’s share fell from 13.4% (₹131.6 crore) to 8.48% (₹102 crore) year-on-year, the loss of a handful of large bank or merchant relationships would still hit disproportionately. Third, cybersecurity and regulatory dependence: the 2021 breach that had to be reported to the RBI and CERT-In was a reminder that a payments company holding card numbers and billing data for millions of consumers carries litigation and reputational risk from a single incident, on top of its structural dependence on banks and NBFC partners continuing to fund EMI and BNPL programmes it enables but does not itself underwrite. Competition from Razorpay, Paytm, PhonePe and banks building their own acquiring stacks, flagged in coverage of the DRHP, adds pricing pressure on top of all three.

The takeaway

Pine Labs’ most transferable lesson is not about payments specifically — it is about what happens to a hardware-led business once its market matures. The company spent two decades known for a box on a shop counter, but the profit eventually showed up in the layer wrapped around that box: subscriptions, transaction fees, float income and an acquired gift-card network, not the device itself. Surviving long enough, through a pandemic, a breach, an abandoned IPO attempt and a nearly halved valuation, to make one well-timed acquisition and let it compound for six years mattered more than any single quarter of hardware sales.

Frequently asked questions

What does Pine Labs actually sell?

Pine Labs sells the payments infrastructure merchants use to accept cards, UPI, EMI and gift cards, both at physical POS terminals and online, and separately runs a gift-card and prepaid-card issuing platform for brands, built around its 2019 acquisition of Qwikcilver.

When did Pine Labs go public and at what valuation?

Pine Labs listed on the NSE and BSE on 14 November 2025 at an issue price of ₹221 a share, pricing the company near $2.9 billion; the stock’s 14% first-day gain took its market capitalisation to roughly ₹28,900 crore (about $3.3 billion), as reported by Reuters and TechCrunch.

Is Pine Labs profitable?

It posted net losses in FY23, FY24 and FY25, though the FY25 loss of ₹145.5 crore was 57% smaller than FY24’s. Since listing it has reported a consolidated net profit in each quarter through Q1 FY27 (quarter ended June 2026), when profit was ₹19.6 crore.

Who are Pine Labs’ biggest shareholders?

Post-IPO, its largest shareholders are Peak XV Partners at 20.35%, Temasek at 7.1%, PayPal at 6%, Actis at 5.78% and Mastercard at 5.24%, according to shareholding disclosures reported around the listing.

Why did Pine Labs move its base from Singapore to India?

Pine Labs was structured with a Singapore parent for years while raising global venture capital; ahead of an India listing, it merged that Singapore entity into its Indian operating company in a “reverse flip,” approved by a Singapore court in May 2024 and by India’s National Company Law Tribunal that August.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

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