MobiKwik's $44.8M investment to triple user-base, boost transactions to $10B

Indian digital mobile wallet startup, MobiKwik, will be investing INR 300 crore ($44.89 million) in a bid to expand its user base to 150 million customers and boost its transactions to $10 billion by the end of 2017, states a Reuters report. Apart from tripling the users base and racking up its gross merchandize value by 500% from the current $2 bilion, the report states that MobiKwik is also looking to raise funds at a level that would give the digital wallet a $1 billion valuation. According to a news report by Buinsess Standard Daman Soni, Vice President for Growth, MobiKwik stated that a majority of the investment will go towards loyalty initiatives, while the remaining will be spent on expanding reach of the platform and network of merchants as well as launching more financial services. The investment will be a mix of existing money as well as fresh funding that it plans to raise. Till now, Sequoia Capital, MediaTek, GMO Venture Partners, Tree Line Asia and Net1 have invested in the startup. Various media channels have stated that the company is also planning to launch its ‘Supercash’ loyalty initiative from coming Monday, which will promote digital payments with transactional benefits. According to the initiative, users can earn reward points at all merchants associated with MobiKwik. A couple of weeks back the company had announced that it is expanding its footprint to cover 13 more cities by the end of March this year and will be hiring more than a 1000 people to drive business growth. According a Hindu Business line report, the company currently has over 1.4 million merchants on its network and aims to grow the base to over 5 million by year end. It seems that digital payment startups such as MobiKwik, Paytm, PhonePe, Oxigen Wallet, TruPay among many others have suddenly sprung into their high-action-mode in the wake of demonetization; benefiting immensely from the push citizens are getting by the government to transact digitally.