Former PayU India Head Amrish Rau Joins Pine Labs As Chief Executive

Former PayU India head Amrish Rau has joined Pine Labs as its chief executive officer barely a month after the point-of-sales service provider raised funds from Mastercard Inc.

Rau will replace the incumbent, Vicky Bindra, who was heading the company since May 2018, Pine Labs said in a statement. Bindra will continue as an advisor, supporting strategic initiatives, but will head back to San Francisco, it said.

“I'm excited to welcome Amrish to the Pine Labs family... I also want to thank Vicky who set us firmly on an exciting high-growth journey,” Lokvir Kapoor, executive chairman of PineLabs, was quoted as saying in the statement. “Vicky challenged us to explore new business areas and to build organisational structures and processes to support those.”

Rau, who has worked for more than two decades in the fintech sector, had co-founded Citrus Payment Solutions, which was later acquired by PayU India for $130 million in an all-cash deal in September 2016. Following the acquisition, Rau served as chief executive of PayU India during October 2016-March 2019, after which he oversaw its fintech investments.

“Pine Labs is an amazing platform, which converges everything from everyday payments, to credit and gift cards,” Rau was quoted as saying in the statement. “Deep domain knowledge and innovative products designs have helped Pine Labs lead the market.”

Founded in 1998, PineLabs which offers cloud-based point-of-sale payments solutions had so far raised $310 million in external funding, according to data available with the business database Crunchbase. The startup allows merchants to accept credit and debit card payments besides transactions using e-wallets, QR codes and unified payments interface and claims to process payments worth more than $30 billion annually by serving 140,000 merchants across 450,000 network points.