The founder trio of the payment gateway, BillDesk, has just hit a gold mine as the fintech firm is being bought by Prosus, South African tech-giant Naspers’ investment firm. The all-cash deal was closed at a whopping $4.7 billion and was aimed at the firm’s efforts to expand the global footprint of their payment gateway PayU, reports Bloomberg.
After the 100 per cent buyout, the founders, M.N. Srinivasu, Karthik Ganapathy, and Ajay Kaushal, are now owners of $500 million each, aligned with their 31 per cent stake in the company. The three met while working for Arthur Anderson, a US-based accounting company. They took the path of becoming entrepreneurs, leaving their successful careers without a concrete plan.
The three IIM-graduates together birthed the idea of a fintech startup at a time when even the word ‘fintech’ wasn’t coined. Moreover, the company started at a time when the Indian internet user base was just 50,000 large. “We are different from the typical young startup founders. Kaushal and I are 53, while Ganapathy is pushing 50. So, when we started in 2000, It was just gut-feel that it would be a great opportunity to build something at the intersection of finance and tech,” Shrinivasu told Bloomberg.
The two-decade-old company has the most significant number of business clients among payment gateways in India and looks after roughly 60 per cent of all billing transactions in the country.
In one of the biggest deals in the Indian consumer internet space, global player Prosus NV on Tuesday said its fintech business PayU will buy digital payments provider BillDesk for $4.7 billion (about Rs 34,376.2 crore). According to an ET report, after the confluence of BillDesk and PayU, the conglomeration will be one of the biggest online payment services with a monumental amount of $147 billion in annual total payment volume (TVP).
Billdesk is a payment platform that gathers billing data from other companies and then brought them to an intersection with bank paper mandates to debit payments from customers’ bank account, resulting in a hassle-free transaction. The company has been making massive profits since 2007 and earned a gross revenue of $253 million in the financial year 2021.
M N Srinivasu, co-founder of BillDesk, said the company has been a pioneer in driving digital payments in India for well over a decade. “This investment by Prosus validates the significant opportunity in India for digital payments that is being propelled by innovation and the progressive regulatory framework put into place by the Reserve Bank of India,” he added.
Read all the Latest News, Breaking News and Assembly Elections Live Updates here.
Comments
0 comment