Billionaire Warren Buffet-led Berkshire Hathaway has invested about Rs 2,500 crore in One97 Communications Ltd, the parent company of Paytm.
Ending days of speculations, Buffett’s assistant, Debbie Bosanek, confirmed the investment news in an email to news agency Reuters. However, she added that Buffett was not involved in the transaction and hence, it is not an investment in Buffet's personal capacity. A formal announcement on the same is expected next week.
Berkshire Hathaway is a US-based financial services firm. With the investment in Paytm, Berkshire Hathaway has set foot in Indian technology space.
The investment will further accentuate Paytm's valuation. Currently, the Alibaba and SoftBank-backed One97 Communications is valued at more than $10 billion.
The deal comes as a boost to Paytm at a strategic point as it competes with Flipkart's PhonePe and Google's Tez, the two popular digital payments platform in India. Paytm has also been aggressively diversifying its business into areas like investment management and e-commerce.
In May 2017, Japan's SoftBank had pumped in $1.4 billion (over Rs 9,079 crore) into Paytm. Paytm has been one of the prominent beneficiaries of the governments move in November 2016 to scrap high denomination notes. It has seen manifold growth in transactions on its platform as well as expansion in number of users.
The company crossed an annual gross transaction run-rate of $29 billion in May this year. It attributed the growth to strong adoption of mobile payments and bank transfers on its platform.
One97 also owns 49 per cent stake in Paytm Payments Bank. Also, Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma had started e-commerce business under Paytm Mall that competes with giants like Amazon and Walmart-backed Flipkart.
(With inputs from agencies)