Paytm, mobile wallet and e-commerce marketplace, is expected to close three-four start-up funding deals this month as part of its investment programme from a corpus of $150-200 million fund which the company had started in 2015, Kiran Vasireddy, Senior Vice President at Paytm told.

“Most of the start-up investment are in the technology space which would largely be mobile tech or fin tech,” he added.

“The investment fund is coming from our balance sheets only. We have invested in about 20 companies till date. This is the ($150-200 million) corpus we have allocated for our investments in the next 2-3 years,” Vasidreddy said.

In the online-tech space, Paytm’s big-ticket investments include $15 million in Jugnoo, on-demand auto-aggregator and $50 million in Little, marketplace for deals. These investments have enabled Paytm to expand its user-base to consumers of Jugnoo and Little and leverage technologies via its $10 million-investment in data analytics start-up LogiNext Solutions.

Earlier this month, Paytm launched loans services for SMEs where small merchants will have access to collateral-free loans for their working capital needs. Paytm has tied-up with Capital Float, Aditya Birla Finance and Capital First to help SMEs raise loans between Rs 10,000 to Rs 100,000. Paytm will act as a facilitator between the financial institution and merchant to help them get unsecured loans. Similar offerings have been launched by companies such as Snapdeal, Flipkart and AskMe Group.

To reinforce its offline strategy Paytm has also updated its app to put offline payments at the forefront, according to Vasireddy. “We have got 400,000 merchants in the span of last 8-9 months and 80-85% of these merchants are offline,” he said.

In the offline segment, Paytm has tie-ups with large organised retail chains such as Big Bazaar, More, and Pizza Hut, among others. Paytm’s partnership with Mother Dairy and Cinepolis India to enables cashless transaction has further strengthened its offline strategy.

The wallet is clocking 90-95 million transactions daily with about 500,000 coming from the utility segment of the app that includes recurring payment such as water, electricity, gas and metro rail. “Utilities alone would have processed something like $1 billion in totality in FY16 and we are hoping for 250-300% growth,” said Vasireddy.

Paytm’s target is about Rs 13,000 crore of GMV from utility bill payments in FY17.

Paytm reported a loss of Rs 372 crore for year ended March 31, 2015, according to the company’s filing with the registrar of companies. It reported revenue of Rs 337 crore on total expenses of Rs 697 crore in FY15.

Source: The Financial Express