Pine Labs gets Singapore court nod to shift base to India

A court has given its nod for Singapore-based merchant commerce startup Pine Labs to move its operations to India.

The court allowed the company to merge the Singapore entity with its Indian unit and transfer its assets and properties, the fintech firm said in a regulatory filing early this month.

TechCrunch first reported on the development on Monday.

The Peak XV-backed firm offers a range of products and services to merchants, including cloud-connected point-of-sale machines and working capital.

The company counts Alpha Wave, Fidelity, Invesco, PayPal and Temasek among its investors, and was last valued at about $5 billion.

Shifting its base to India will help Pine Labs “achieve business synergies and more economies of scale,” the fintech firm said in the court filing, adding that it will also help “achieve cost savings” and “simplification of shareholding structure.”

Indian startups that are currently based out of Singapore and the US are exploring relocating to India as the regulatory framework back home becomes more favorable and the ease of doing business improves.

Pine Labs is the latest among the slew of companies that are looking to shift their domicile to India.

Tiger Global-backed financial services startup Groww shifted its domicile to India from the US, following in the footsteps of peers such as Walmart-backed PhonePe that are setting up their bases in the country.

Zepto, Udaan, Razorpay, Meesho, and Flipkart are exploring shifting their bases to India.

To be sure, not every Indian startup based abroad may have the resources to fund such a relocation, a process dubbed “reverse flip”.

The government has been pushing for the relocation of these foreign-based startups.

A report by an expert committee tasked with finding had last year suggested tweaks in policies including taxation, infrastructure, company law, and dispute resolution to woo startups that have “flipped: abroad to relocate to the International Financial Services Centre in Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, or GIFT City.