• PhonePe is gearing up for an initial public offering (IPO) with a target valuation of $15 billion, backed by major global and Indian banks.
  • The firm is leveraging its dominance in UPI transactions while expanding into lending, insurance, and wealth management.
  • Walmart, which holds a majority stake, sees the IPO as a key move to strengthen its foothold in India's booming fintech sector.

PhonePe, India's leading digital payments platform, is advancing its initial public offering (IPO) plans, targeting a valuation of $15 billion.

The Walmart-backed fintech giant is working with top global and Indian banks to structure the offering, aiming to raise substantial capital to fuel its expansion.

After the public announcement that it has started the process for a public listing, the payments aggregator has picked four investment banks as advisors for the IPO, namely Citi, JP Morgan, Kotak Mahindra Capital and Morgan Stanley.

"PhonePe's strong top-line and bottom-line growth cross its diverse business portfolio, as detailed in its FY 23-24 annual report, makes this a suitable time to prepare for a public listing," it said in a statement last week.

As a leading dominant player in India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ecosystem, currently has over 500 million registered users and processes billions of transactions monthly.

With the IPO, the company is accelerating its presence in digital payments and pushing financial services including lending, insurance and wealth management.

PhonePe has successfully secured partnerships with major banking institutions to enhance its product offerings. With the expected IPO proceedings, the company is supposed to strengthen the payment infrastructure.

The targeted $15 billion valuation will be a 19% premium over Phonepe's previous valuation of $12.6 billion when it last raised growth capital in a Series-D round of $658 million in January 2023.

Phonepe's majority owner is Walmart (71%), with private equity investor General Atlantic holding a 4.4% stake and other investors like Qatar Investment Authority, Ribbit Capital and Tiger Global holding smaller stakes in the company.

Edited by Harshajit Sarmah