Digital Wallet Startup MobiKwik Seeks $300M In IPO

One MobiKwik Systems Pvt is inching closer to an initial public offering in Mumbai, India, that could raise about $300 million, sources told Bloomberg.

MobiKwik, an Indian digital wallet and payments startup, plans to file a draft prospectus with the Indian securities regulator “as soon as the next few days,” the sources said. The company could seek a valuation of around $1 billion from the IPO, they told Bloomberg.

The company is planning to raise about $250 million through the IPO, and current MobiKwik stockholders are considering selling about $50 million in shares to reach the $300 million level, the sources said. A MobiKwik representative wouldn’t comment to Bloomberg on its report.

Demonetization came to India five years ago, at a time when most of the country’s 1.3 billion residents weren’t prepared for it and Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave them only four hours to convert all 500 and 1,000-rupee notes, roughly equivalent to about $10 or $20, to digital currency.

Payments platform PhonePe was at the time the only non-banking app to launch on the new unified payment interface (UPI) when demonetization happened in India. The UPI is a system that combines multiple bank accounts into a single mobile app (of any participating bank) and introduced peer-to-peer (P2P) payments as well as digital wallets to the country.

Within three months, PhonePe had 10 million installs, PhonePe CEO Sameer Nigam told Karen Webster. Within four, it merged into India’s primary eCommerce platform, Flipkart, and today, it has about 300 million active users.

“We believe that payments will reach a billion people,” Nigam said. “After mobile data and cheap smartphones, I think we will get there. And unless everyone migrates to digital payments, the eCommerce markets [in] all these other categories won’t even really scale up. It’s almost an infrastructure issue.”