PhonePe, India’s largest digital payments platform, has put its IPO plans on hold, citing geopolitical tensions and stock market instability.
On Monday, the Bengaluru-based company said it had paused its IPO plans but would go public once market conditions improve. The move comes less than two months after the fintech company filed an updated IPO prospectus, targeting a listing on Indian stock exchanges later this year.
As tensions in the Middle East escalate, global financial markets are shaken and oil prices soar, causing investors to withdraw from the stock market. India’s benchmark stock indices Nifty 50 and BSE Sensex have each fallen about 9% over the past month, with hundreds of Indian stocks recording double-digit declines since February 28, when the dispute began.
PhonePe, which was valued at around $12 billion in January 2023, had targeted a market capitalization of around $15 billion in its IPO, which could raise as much as $1.5 billion.
But more recently, investment bankers working with PhonePe for the IPO suggested lowering the expected valuation to around $9 billion, two people familiar with the company told TechCrunch.
PhonePe said claims that the IPO was paused due to valuation issues were “baseless”.
“We have paused the process due to current market conditions, which are unrelated to PhonePe,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
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PhonePe’s IPO was expected to provide an exit for several early investors. Tiger Global and Microsoft planned to sell their entire stakes, while majority shareholder Walmart planned to retain control and sell up to 45.9 million shares, or about 9% of the company, according to the IPO filing.
Founded in 2015 by Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari and Burzin engineers, PhonePe was acquired by e-commerce giant Flipkart a year later and has since grown to become India’s largest digital payments platform. The company is leading the Indian government-backed Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ecosystem, ahead of Google Pay in terms of transaction volume.
According to data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), in February 2026, PhonePe processed about 9.3 billion transactions worth about ₹13.1 trillion (about $141.9 billion), while Google Pay processed 6.8 billion transactions worth about ₹9 trillion (about $97.8 billion).
Flipkart spun off PhonePe into a separate company in 2022, but Walmart remained the fintech’s largest shareholder. The company started as a digital payments platform but has since expanded into financial services, offering stock brokerage and mutual fund investing, as well as an Android app store that positions it as an alternative to the Google Play Store.
PhonePe’s operating revenue for the six months ended September 2025 was ₹39.19 billion (about $424.4 million), up 22% from a year ago, according to the prospectus. The company’s losses widened to $14.44 billion (about $156.4 million) from $12.03 billion (about $130.4 million) a year ago as it continued to spend to expand its services.
