Before it counted card swipes at shopping counters, Pine Labs counted litres at petrol pumps.
The company was incorporated in New Delhi on 18 May 1998 as Pine Labs Private Limited, to automate petroleum retail with smart cards and loyalty programmes. Two people signed it into existence, Rajul Garg and Tarun Upadhyay, with 100 shares each at ₹10 apiece, ₹1,000 each.
The petrol-pump cards had taught the team how to put technology into a shop's daily routine, and that skill travelled.
Lokvir Kapoor is not on that first page. An IIT Kanpur mechanical engineer of the 1987 batch, with an MBA from IIM Bangalore and years at Schlumberger behind him, he came in afterwards, and by 2007 he held shares through the company's employee option plan.
The first outside money was small and close to home. In March 2005 a company called Induslogic, Inc took 920,000 shares at one rupee each, about ₹9.2 lakh, and bought more the next year. Induslogic was the name the software firm GlobalLogic carried until 2006, and Garg and Upadhyay were among the founders of GlobalLogic. Within a few years of starting Pine Labs, the two had moved on to it.
Around 2004 the founding team thinned out and Kapoor took charge as CEO. The company had to decide what it wanted to be. In 2005 it launched Plutus, a way for shops to accept credit and debit cards, with monthly instalments and loyalty offers built in.
The petrol-pump cards had taught the team how to put technology into a shop's daily routine, and that skill travelled. It chose merchants. Pine Labs moved from fuel stations to the counters of retailers, selling point-of-sale machines that took cards. Over the next decade Kapoor steered it from a niche hardware seller toward payments infrastructure that banks and shops both leaned on.
That patient bet drew serious money. In 2018 Actis and Altimeter put in $82 million, then Temasek and PayPal followed with $125 million, which made it a unicorn. Mastercard, Lone Pine, Fidelity, BlackRock and Alpha Wave came later. At its peak private valuation, the company was marked at $5 billion.
The price of scale was not small. A data breach in 2021 exposed information on up to 500,000 users. A planned US listing was shelved after a confidential filing in 2022. Ahead of its Indian IPO, the valuation expectation was reportedly cut by about 40 per cent to around $2.9 billion.
It finally listed in India on 14 November 2025 at an issue price of ₹221. The shares opened at ₹242, touched ₹283 during the day and closed at ₹251.30, a market value of about ₹28,856 crore. Its latest annual numbers show revenue of ₹2,274 crore for FY25 and a net loss of ₹145 crore.
The company has since widened into prepaid cards, gift vouchers through its Qwikcilver acquisition, and credit tools for lenders, and in February 2026 announced a tie-up with OpenAI for AI-driven shopping payments.
There is a plain lesson for founders in that long road. Pine Labs took 27 years to reach the stock exchange. The business it started with, petrol-pump cards, is not the one it listed. What lasted was the relationship with the people at the counter.