PhonePe clears regulatory hurdle, sets stage for India IPO

MUMBAI: PhonePe, the Walmart-backed digital payments firm, has received regulatory approval to proceed with its stock market listing, clearing a key hurdle after confidentially filing for an initial public offering in September, reports Reuters. 

The IPO is expected to include partial share sales by existing investors including Walmart, Microsoft and Tiger Global. 

The listing comes as India’s primary markets continue to run hot, with equity fundraising touching record levels in 2025. PhonePe is targeting a market debut by mid-2026. The company was last valued at $12 billion in 2023, when it raised funds from private investors.

Founded in 2015, PhonePe is India’s largest payments platform on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), commanding over 45 per cent market share by transaction volume as of December 2025. It processed 9.8 billion of the 21.6 billion UPI transactions recorded in August, according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India.

The company counts more than 600 million registered users and serves nearly 50 million merchants nationwide. A delay by Indian regulators in enforcing market-share caps on UPI in 2024 has benefited dominant players such as PhonePe and Google Pay.

Ahead of the IPO, PhonePe disclosed that its losses narrowed to Rs 17.2 billion ($189 million) in the year ended March 2025, from Rs 19.96 billion a year earlier, signalling improving financial discipline as it prepares to tap public markets.