Dressing Pine Labs for IPO: What ‘fintech bully’ Amrish Rau can learn from Paytm

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Mint, sitting in his office in Bengaluru’s Koramangala neighbourhood. In 2013, he co-founded Citrus Pay, another payments company, and sold it to Naspers-owned PayU in a cash deal worth $130 million in 2016. Rau decided to take the keys from Singh and joined Pine Labs as CEO in March 2020.

Four years after that, Pine Labs is valued at about $5 billion and is India’s fourth most valued fintech company, behind PhonePe ($12 bn), Razorpay ($7.5 bn) and Cred ($6.4 bn). Reportedly, it is considering raising about $1 billion in an initial public offering (IPO). According to a Bloomberg report, Pine Labs may seek a valuation of more than $6 billion in the IPO, the largest by an Indian fintech firm since One97 Communications Ltd, the operator of Paytm, raised approximately $2.5 billion in 2021.

What exactly did Rau do to grow Pine Labs into the fintech giant it is today? In short, a lot has changed since he took over. While Pine Labs has its hits, there are significant misses, too. Unlike Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Paytm’s founder, or Ashneer Grover, the former managing director of BharatPe, Rau can come across as less charismatic and more measured when he speaks in public.

He graduated from a little-known college, Shah & Anchor Kutchhi Engineering College, in Chembur, Mumbai. And his career didn’t begin with a flourish either—he started by selling automated teller machines (ATMs). Rau interned at a newly opened branch of Siemens called Siemens Nixdorf.

“They were into passbook printers and ATMs. As luck would have it, I ended up making the first sale for the company ever in India, and they retained me after the end of my three-month internship," he recollected. Selling ATMs, nonetheless, set up his career in financial services, and