Since 2021, India’s Unified Payments Interface has attracted over $5.8 billion in private equity, with funding increasingly focusing on a handful of dominant firms as the sector recovers and expands internationally.
India’s Unified Payments Interface has become one of the country’s most heavily backed fintech rails, drawing about $5.8 billion in private equity funding across 371 disclosed rounds since 2021, according to a Tracxn report cited by The Hindu BusinessLine. But the money has not been spread evenly: capital has increasingly clustered around a small group of scaled firms that now dominate the ecosystem.
Consumer payments platforms captured the biggest share of funding, at about 53% or nearly $3.1 billion. Business payments accounted for 38%, or roughly $2.2 billion, while infrastructure providers, including application programming interfaces and other underlying technology, made up the remaining 9%, or about $526 million, the report said.
The concentration at the top is striking. CRED, PhonePe, Pine Labs, Razorpay and BharatPe together accounted for about 66% of disclosed funding since 2021. CRED and PhonePe each raised about $1 billion over the period, while Pine Labs secured $641 million, Razorpay $535 million and BharatPe $440 million, according to the Tracxn data reported by The Hindu BusinessLine.
The funding cycle peaked during the 2021 start-up surge, then cooled through 2022 to 2024 before showing a tentative recovery in 2026, helped by CRED’s $540 million round. That pattern mirrors the broader fintech boom in India, which Fortune India reported reached a record $10 billion in 2021, as digital payments accelerated sharply during the pandemic and UPI usage surged.
The sector is also maturing through exits and dealmaking. Since 2021, payments companies have completed eight initial public offerings and 25 acquisitions, with listed names including Paytm, Pine Labs, MobiKwik and Zaggle. Larger platforms are now buying capabilities as much as building them, with Razorpay acquiring Ezetap and IZealiant, and Pine Labs buying Setu and Mosambee. M2P, Juspay, PayU and Perfios have also used acquisitions to broaden their offerings.
Beyond India, UPI is gaining traction abroad. Cross-border transactions rose more than 20-fold from about 37,060 in FY24 to more than 7.5 lakh in FY25, and the rail is now live in more than 12 countries, according to the report. That international expansion, together with products such as credit-on-UPI and fraud prevention tools, suggests the next phase of growth will depend less on transaction volumes alone and more on whether private capital continues to support the commercial layers built around the public system.
Disclaimer: This article is intended to inform and educate, not to recommend or endorse any financial product, investment or strategy. Please consider your own financial circumstances and seek professional advice where appropriate before making financial decisions.
