Walmart invests $200 million in Indian mobile payments giant PhonePe

The startup has said that it plans to raise up to $1 billion as part of the ongoing round.We are excited about PhonePes future and have confidence in how it continues to expand its offerings and provide access to financial services for Indians at scale. It competes with Google Pay and Paytm, the latter of which is currently valued at nearly $5 billion.PhonePe dominates transactions on UPI, a network built by a coalition of retail banks in India. Walmart, which also owns a majority share in e-commerce giant Flipkart, said last month the separation of Flipkart and PhonePe was very analogous to eBay and PayPal, where each of them operating independently can pursue their own initiatives.A concern for PhonePes growth was the The National Payments Corporation of India, which oversees the UPI network, enforcing a check on the market share of each participating player. However, it recently extended the deadline until 2025, which has paved the way for another two years of fast growth for PhonePe.PhonePe is also slowly becoming a distribution engine, leveraging the large base of 450 million registered users to cross-sell products such as insurance. We are excited about the next phase of our growth as we build new offerings for Indian consumers and merchants, along with enabling financial inclusion across the nation, said Sameer Nigam, co-founder and chief executive of PhonePe, in the statement.