Neuberger Berman marks down Pine Labs' and PharmEasy's valuations

In the wake of macroeconomic headwinds, Pine Labs and PharmEasy parent API Holdings have seen their valuations slashed by investors internally.

According to the investor's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Neuberger Berman reduced the fair value of API Holdings and Pine Labs by 21.6 percent and 39 percent, respectively.

In 2021, PharmEasy attempted to go public but later retracted its plans. It was valued at $5.6 billion at that time. In contrast, Pine Labs, a POS and payment solution provider backed by Sequoia Capital and Mastercard, was valued at $5 billion last year.

According to the filings, Neuberger Berman also invests in Gupshup, a cloud-based chatbot development platform.

In India and elsewhere, Pine Labs and PharmEasy have joined a growing list of unicorns that investors are marking down by a significant amount.

Over the past few months, investors such as Blackrock, Invesco, and Vanguard have been marking down unicorns and decacorns (startups with a valuation higher than $10 billion), including Byju's, Swiggy, and Ola.

Global investors are pessimistic due to rising interest rates and geopolitical risks. This has led to significant reductions in private market investments.

So far, SoftBank has not invested in a single deal in India this year, having cut its investments by more than 90 percent between April 2022 and March 2023.