Paytm has signed a non-exclusive term sheet to acquire Jasper Infotech owned FreeCharge.
Paytm will begin financial and commercial due diligence of FreeCharge next week.
If successful, the deal, estimated at between $45 million and $90 million, could be finalised in a month.
The report also said that the Paytm is in advanced stage of discussions to raise up to USD 1.9 billion in fresh funding from Japan’s Soft-Bank that could value it between USD 8 billion and USD 9 billion. The Softbank, which is Snapdeal’s largest stakeholder, is currently negotiating the sale of the company to rival firm Flipkart.
Founded in 2010 by Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon and backed by investors such as Valiant Capital Management, Tybourne Capital Management, and Sequoia Capital.
Freecharge was acquired in April 2015 by Snapdeal for nearly $450 Million. It is currently owned and run by Jasper Infotech – the parent company of Snapdeal.
Apart from Paytm, FreeCharge, which was acquired by Snapdeal for $400-450 million in April 2015, in what was then the largest acquisition in the Indian startup ecosystem, competes with the likes of Naspers-owned PayU India and MobiKwik, amongst others.
As compared to FreeCharge, Paytm had said last month that till April 26 it had done 255 million transactions, running close to 10 million transactions a day.
The Noida-based company said that it closed fiscal 2017 with three-fold growth in total transactions to 1.5 billion. The company has about 218 million wallet users, and is more than double the size of closest competitors like MobiKwik.
