Following the news that India-based merchant payments and financial services provider BharatPe has raised US$370m in fresh Series E funding;  

Aurojyoti Bose, Lead Analyst at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers his view:

“As rightly predicted by GlobalData’s Unicorn Prediction Model (uses proprietary machine learning (ML) algorithms to accurately identify promising future unicorns), BharatPe turned up to be an unicorn and joined the league with the new round of funding placing its valuation at US$2.85bn.

“Of the latest US$370m Series E funding round, existing investors such as Sequoia Capital, Amplo, Ribbit Capital Insight Partners and Coatue Management collectively invested US$200m. A sizable funding from new investors also reflects the positive sentiment towards the Indian mobile payments sector.

“GlobalData forecasts the Indian mobile payments market to grow at a CAGR of 41% between 2020 and 2024 and will be worth more than US$2 trillion by 2024. Against this backdrop, BharatPe has been expanding its footprint and already has presence across more than 100 cities in India.

“The fresh injection of capital will help the company pursue its business expansion plans more aggressively and as such it is already making headlines by offering superbikes to new joinees. BharatPe is likely to use the freshly infused capital to fuel its digital banking ambitions as it has already received an in-principle approval from the Indian central bank Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

“An analysis of GlobalData’s Financial Deals database reveals that BharatPe raised US$655m in venture capital (VC) funding since its inception. GlobalData expects to see more of such capital raising moves by BharatPe as it is likely for the company to wait for some years before it plans to go public.”