PhonePe, India’s largest digital payments platform, has put its IPO plans on hold, citing geopolitical tensions and a volatile stock market.
On Monday, the Bengaluru-based company said it had put its IPO plans on hold but remains committed to listing once market conditions improve. The move comes less than two months after the fintech filed an updated IPO prospectus, aiming to list on Indian exchanges later this year.
Escalating tensions in the Middle East have rattled global financial markets and pushed oil prices higher, prompting investors to pull out of stocks. India’s stock benchmarks Nifty 50 and BSE Sensex have each fallen about 9% in the past month, with hundreds of Indian stocks falling recorded a double-digit decline since the conflict began on February 28.
PhonePe, valued at around $12 billion in January 2023, was targeting a market capitalization of around $15 billion in its IPO, which could have raised up to $1.5 billion.
More recently, however, investment bankers working with PhonePe on its IPO suggested lowering its valuation expectations to around $9 billion, two people familiar with the company told TechCrunch.
PhonePe said any claims that the IPO has been put on hold due to valuation concerns are “baseless”.
“We have stopped the process only due to current market conditions, which are not related 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 stage investors. According to the IPO filing, Tiger Global and Microsoft were to sell their entire stakes, and majority owner Walmart planned to offload up to 45.9 million shares, or about 9% of the company, while retaining control.
Founded in 2015 by Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari and Burzin Engineer, PhonePe was acquired by e-commerce giant Flipkart a year later and has since grown into India’s largest digital payments platform. The company leads the Indian government-backed Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ecosystem in transaction volumes, ahead of Google Pay.
In February 2026, PhonePe processed about 9.3 billion transactions worth about ₹13.1 trillion (about $141.9 billion), compared to Google Pay’s 6.8 billion transactions worth about ₹9 trillion (about $97.8 billion), according to data by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).
Flipkart spun off PhonePe into a separate company in 2022, though Walmart remained the fintech’s largest shareholder. The company started as a digital payments platform, but has since expanded into financial services, offering stock and mutual fund investments, as well as an Android app store positioned as an alternative to Google’s Play Store.
In the six months ending September 2025, PhonePe’s revenue from operations rose 22% to ₹39.19 billion (about $424.4 million) from a year earlier, according to its prospectus. The company’s losses widened to ₹14.44 billion (about $156.4 million) from ₹12.03 billion (about $130.4 million) a year earlier as it continued to spend to expand its services.
