Amrish Rau joins Sequoia-backed Pine Labs as CEO

Weeks after leaving PayU, Amrish Rau, former fintech investments and partnerships head at the Prosus-owned payments firm, has joined Pine Labs as CEO. 

With nearly two decades of experience in the information technology, finance, and fintech areas, Rau will be leading the company, in his new role, Noida headquartered Pine Labs said in a statement on Tuesday. 

Rau replaces Vicky Bindra, who will continue to be an advisor to the company supporting strategic initiatives.

“With Amrish’s ability to innovate, seek out options with channels and customers we believe Pine Labs can be a true global commerce platform,” said Lokvir Kapoor, executive chairman, Pine Labs.

Prior to his last role at PayU, Rau was CEO of the firm and served in that role till March last year. He joined PayU in 2016 when it acquired Mumbai-based payment gateway startup Citrus Pay for $130 million. Rau was part of the Citrus Pay founding team. 

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Apart from PayU and Citrus Pay, Rau has worked in companies such as Siemens Nixdorf, NCR Corporation, Teradata, and First Data Corporation.

“Pine Labs is an amazing platform that converges everything from everyday payments, to credit and gift cards. Deep domain knowledge and innovative product designs have helped Pine Labs lead the market. Using cloud technologies, Pine Labs wants to be all things commerce for merchants, help them save time and operate businesses efficiently,” Rau said in the statement.

Pine Labs is a merchant commerce platform. Its cloud-based platform enables it to offer a wide range of payment acceptance and merchant commerce solutions. The company’s key investors include Sequoia India, Actis Capital, Temasek, PayPal, Sofina and Mastercard.

The company claims to currently process payments worth $30 billion a year and serves around 140,000 merchants across about 450,000 network points.

In January, it rolled out Pine Labs Paper POS for its merchants. It is an all-in-one solution for accepting multiple forms of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Bharat QR payments through a single merged static QR at the point of sale. It had raised an undisclosed sum from global payments solution company Mastercard. Last year in July, the company bagged Rs 707 crore (around $102.6 million then) from its Singapore-headquartered parent company Pine Labs Pte.