Walmart-Backed PhonePe Targets $9–$10.5 Billion Valuation In IPO

The Walmart-backed fintech firm plans to list at a valuation between $9 billion and $10.5 billion, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters. The IPO is expected to raise between $900 million and $1.05 billion. At the upper end, the valuation would be lower than the $12 billion valuation at which PhonePe raised $100 million in private funding in 2023.

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According to the company’s IPO filing, Walmart will reduce its stake by about 12% in the offering. Tiger Global and Microsoft plan to exit their stakes. The three shareholders will together sell around 50.7 million shares. PhonePe will not issue new shares as part of the IPO.

PhonePe filed its draft papers in September and aims to complete the listing process by April, one of the sources told Reuters. The timeline may shift depending on market conditions.

Market Position And Financials

PhonePe competes with Google Pay and Paytm in India’s digital payments market. Its listing would make it the country’s second-largest fintech IPO after Paytm’s $20 billion public offering in 2021, according to Reuters. Paytm currently has a market capitalisation of about $7.1 billion.

Regulatory data showed that PhonePe has over 650 million registered users and processed nearly 10 billion of the 21.7 billion transactions on India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in January.

India launched UPI in 2016 and does not permit companies to charge fees for the instant payment service, according to official policy.

PhonePe’s IPO filing showed that its losses widened to ₹1,444 crore in the six months ended September 30, compared with ₹1,203 crore a year earlier. Revenue rose about 22% to ₹3,918 crore during the same period.

The proposed IPO structure and valuation indicate that existing investors will partially exit their holdings while the company proceeds with a secondary share sale, according to the filing and Reuters.