BillDesk, a payments gateway is looking to sell its company as the company’s private equity investors want to leave the company due to an overall growing interest of investing in payments market, according to reports. Those investors include private equity companies TA Associates and General Atlantic and venture capital firm Clearstone Venture and government held Singaporean company Temasek Holdings.
BillDesk has already contacted three potential buyers in the name of PayU, American Express and PayPal but refused to sell the company below their asking price, which stands between $1.5-2 billion. A price that none of the above-mentioned companies is ready to meet and all three deals fell through due to valuation disagreements. BillDesk decided to keep operating independently until and unless they reach an agreement with a buyer willing to buy the company for their asking price.
M.N Srinivasu, Karthink Ganapathy and Ajay Kaushal founded the firm in 2000 and they managed to keep the company profitable and set it apart from all other startups by keeping a low profile. Indeed, BillDesk is a very profitable internet company reporting a net profit of Rs76 crore from revenues worth Rs520 crore for the year end March 2016, which are the latest numbers available.
BillDesk currently competes with the likes of PayU, CCAvenue, Razorpay and more by delivering payment solutions for people using e-commerce, in financial services, retail and additional sectors. BillDesk generates revenues by charging commission on transactions carried out by customers utilizing those e-commerce platforms. The company is reported to generate over tens of billions of dollars from online transactions annually.
India’s digital payment businesses, be it business-to-business facilities or business-to-customer has witnessed an unprecedented growth in the past three years. For example, Citrus Pay was acquired by PayU Global for $120 Mn. PineLabs received a funding worth $82 million this month only from Actis Capital and Altimeter Capital; the investment skyrocketed the company’s valuation to almost $1 billion. Similarly, Paytm recently raised investments that inflated its valuation to over 50 times its initial value in three years and now boasts a market value of $10.2 billion. In August 2016, Unified Payments Interface was introduced to the Indian Territory, provoking several leading tech companies such as Flipkart Ltd, Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. to step in the market with their own payment applications.