ET reported on April 13 that
both parties were looking to settle the matter after filing cases against each other in the Singapore High Court starting May 2021.
ET
broke the news on April 13 that a senior judge of the Singapore High Court had dismissed at least two appeals filed by Affle, a shareholder of Indus OS, which challenged the acquisition of the Bengaluru-based startup by PhonePe after a term sheet for the acquisition was signed.
As a part of the deal, PhonePe will now acquire AGPL’s entire stake at a premium.
“We are very excited to embark on this journey with OSLabs and build just the kind of the localised app store that India needs,” said Sameer Nigam, founder and chief executive officer (CEO), PhonePe.
With the acquisition, PhonePe will pursue its stated vision of building a homegrown horizontal appstore, while AGPL will get a premium on its original investment, PhonePe said in a statement on Friday.
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”We are happy that the matter has been amicably settled for all the entities. We wish the PhonePe team the very best for its stated vision of building a homegrown horizontal app store,’’ said Mei Theng Leong, director of AGPL.
Last June,
PhonePe had complained to the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) against another existing investor of Indus OS, Ventureast, and its officials for “scuttling the deal”. PhonePe had said that Ventureast did “side dealings” with Affle Global “deliberately” in a “bad faith attempt to scuttle” PhonePe’s acquisition of Indus OS. Affle maintained in its appeal that the term sheet was non-binding.
Even as the acquisition ran into trouble, PhonePe acquired around 26% from select shareholders of Indus OS and these investors are referred to as vendor shareholders in the company. Omidyar Network, JSW Ventures and Micromax had sold their shares to PhonePe based on the term sheet.
