eBay to fund Paytm $200 million, boosting the payment battle

According to a report, Paytm Mall is raising up around $200 million fund from eBay at a much lower valuation of $600-800 million as compared to $2 billion in the last round.

Paytm has also raised up to $2 billion from its major existing investors, Masayoshi Son led SoftBank Vision Fund and Jack Ma’s Ant Financial, the payment affiliate of Alibaba Group.

The entity name of Paytm, One97 Communications Ltd. is going to be valued between $16-18 billion for this double billion round.

In the last round worth $300 million from Berkshire Hathaway and was valued at $10 billion, and in a secondary round the figure had hiked up to $16 billion.

The most probable scenario is of the round being internal funding, but there are chances that new investors also make a contribution in the round.

eBay’s funding in Paytm Mall comes after Softbank starting owning 19 per cent stake in the company, while the 38 per cent shares is of Ant Financial’s. With this funding, the accumulation of stake is bound to increase. This is why SoftBank and Alibaba’s play in the Indian Digital Payments’ market becomes much more significant.

Flipkart has also agreed to disinvest from its Payments subsidiary PhonePe as the company looks to raise $1 billion in the capital-consuming fight with Paytm and Google Pay. All this makes the Payments battle all the more intense.