PhonePe raises $200 million from former parent Walmart

India’s FinTech platform PhonePe has raised another $200 million, this time with the help of Walmart.

The funding, announced on Friday (March 17), comes a month after the company announced it had raised $100 million in a round that valued it at $12 billion.

This new funding keeps PhonePe’s valuation at that level and is part of its ongoing efforts to raise up to $1 billion in capital, the company said in a press release.

“We would like to thank Walmart, our majority investor, for their continued support of our long-term ambitions,” said Sameer Nigam, PhonePe’s founder and CEO. “We are excited for the next phase of our growth as we build new offerings for Indian consumers and merchants, along with enabling financial inclusion across the nation.”

Founded in 2015, PhonePe was acquired by Flipkart, an India-based e-commerce platform that is itself owned by Walmart, the following year.

The two Indian companies severed ties last year, a mutual decision the firms said would allow their businesses to expand independently. As PYMNTS noted last month, Walmart remains the majority shareholder of both companies.

The company says it plans to use the new funding to build and scale new offerings such as insurance, wealth management, lending and stockbroking, while helping it expand its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payments program in India.

PhonePe announced in February that it enabled cross-border UPI payments in select countries, allowing customers in India to pay foreign merchants instantly when traveling abroad.

“I am confident that this launch will prove to be a game-changer and will completely transform the way Indians traveling abroad pay at overseas outlets,” PhonePe co-founder and chief technology officer Rahul Chari said in the announcement.

As PYMNTS has noted, merchants looking to expand into India must take into account the fact that payments are relatively new, and therefore largely unregulated in the country.

“Additionally, while the Indian government allows foreign companies to own and operate business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce marketplaces, these companies cannot distribute their own inventory,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this month.

These marketplaces are also not allowed to influence product prices, which limits the ability of newcomers to make money after cross-border fees are taken into account.

PYMNTS research shows that India’s e-commerce market is one of the fastest growing in the world, with annual online sales exceeding $67 billion by 2021.

Almost 9 out of 10 Indian adults use some form of mobile wallet, and 833.7 million consumers are connected to the internet. Foreign firms such as Amazon and eBay also have a large presence in India, allowing local sellers to market their products both domestically and internationally.