The founding trio of payment gateway, BillDesk, have just entered a gold mine as the fintech firm is being bought by South African tech-giant Naspers’ investment firm Prosus. The cash deal was closed for $4.7 billion and was aimed at the firm’s efforts to expand the global footprint of its payment gateway PayU, as Bloomberg reports.
After the 100 percent buyout, the founders, MN Srinivasu, Karthik Ganapathi, and Ajay Kaushal, now each own $500 million, with their 31 percent stake in the company attached. The trio met while working for Arthur Anderson, an accounting company in America. He left his successful career without any concrete plan and took the path of becoming an entrepreneur.
The three IIM graduates together gave birth to the idea of a fintech startup when the word ‘fintech’ was not even coined. Furthermore, 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 years old, while Ganpati is crossing the age of 50. So, when we started in 2000, it was very encouraging that this would be a great opportunity to build something at the intersection of finance and technology,” Srinivasu told Bloomberg.
The two-decade-old company has the largest number of business customers among payment gateways in India and handles nearly 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 a report by ET, the conglomerate will be one of the largest online payment services post the confluence of BillDesk and PayU, with a whopping $147 billion in annual total payment volume (TVP).
BillDesk is a payment platform that collects billing data from other companies and then brings them at a crossroads with the Bank Paper mandate to debit payments from customers’ bank accounts, resulting in hassle-free transactions. The company has been making massive profits since 2007 and generated gross revenue of $253 million in fiscal year 2021.
BillDesk co-founder MN Srinivasu said the company has been a pioneer in driving digital payments in India for over a decade. “This investment by Prosus confirms the significant opportunity in India for digital payments driven by innovation and the progressive regulatory framework established by the Reserve Bank of India,” he added.
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