Pine Labs, a merchant commerce startup, has received approval from a Singapore court to merge its local entity with its Indian unit and transfer all its assets and properties, thereby allowing the company to move its operations to India.
Pine Labs disclosed the court order in a recent regulatory filing viewed by TechCrunch.
Pine Labs offers a range of products and services to merchants, such as cloud-connected point-of-sale machines and working capital. It is backed by Peak XV, Fidelity, Invesco, Temasek, PayPal and Alpha Wave and is valued at over $5 billion.
It is one of the handful of Indian startups that have recently moved to India. Meesho, Zepto, Flipkart, Razorpay and Udaan are also evaluating a similar approach. Fintech startups PhonePe and Groww have already moved their foreign holding entities to India.
Pine Labs declined to comment.
An investor in Indian startups said companies are moving their domiciles to India because startups with valuations below $20 billion are very unlikely to receive significant coverage from analysts in developed markets, which will result in limited demand from institutional investors.
“But in India, everything is trading at a high price because there is high demand for technology companies,” said the investor, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. Entrepreneur Gokul Rajaram made a similar observation about software companies in India.
The transfer should help Pine Labs “achieve business synergies and greater economies of scale,” the startup said in its court filing. It will also help the company “achieve cost savings” and “simplify the shareholding structure”.
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