Pine Labs Acquires Setu in Reported $70M to $75M Deal

Merchant commerce omnichannel platform company Pine Labs is acquiring application programming interface (API) infrastructure startup Setu to bolster its suite of digital payments and lending products, according to a Thursday (June 23) press release.

The deal is valued between $70 million and $75 million, Indian paid television station CNBC-TV18 reported, citing unnamed sources.

Headquartered in Bengaluru, India and founded in 2018 by Sahil Kini and Nikhil Kumar, Setu offers services across bill payments, savings, credit and payments.

Under the acquisition deal, the startup will retain its brand identity, business, 90 to 100 employees and customers, according to a Setu blog post on Thursday (June 23).

See also: Home Credit India Partners With Pine Labs to Build Omnichannel Transactions Network

“Setu helps their customers, merchants, and brands build beautiful experiences, so consumers can engage with payments and financial services on their terms. We are in the golden phase of digitization in India, and Setu is a pioneer in supporting innovation on the India stack — their work on UPI and in the account aggregator space is moving the industry forward,” Pine Labs CEO B. Amrish Rau said in the release.

Rau added that together, Setu and Pine Labs will “tackle hard problems” in the embedded finance market and open banking ecosystem.

Founded in 1998 by Lokvir Kapoor and headquartered in Noida, India, Pine Labs became a unicorn in 2020. Setu is the company’s third acquisition this year following Mosambee in April and Qfix Infocomm in February.

Pine Labs partnered with Home Credit India (HCI) in April to enable Home Credit Ujjwal Card’s digital equated monthly installment financing options at Pine Labs point-of-sale terminals around India.

Read more: Pine Labs Grabs Majority Stake in Mosambee

With end-to-end payment solution provider Mosambee, Pine Labs can elevate the merchant experience using Mosambee’s cutting-edge FinTech solutions. Mosambee’s clients include small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), private and government entities and financial institutions in India.

Nandan Nilekani, co-founder and chairman of Infosys Technologies Limited, said by partnering with Pine Labs, Setu will accelerate their API infrastructure goal. The infrastructure Setu is developing “will be very important for India in the years to come.”