Walmart’s PhonePe Targets $15 Billion Valuation in IPO

PhonePe, India’s largest digital payments company, is reportedly preparing to go public.

The Walmart-backed company filed preliminary documents via the confidential route for an initial public offering (IPO), Bloomberg reported Wednesday (Sept. 24). The IPO could raise up to $1.5 billion and value the FinTech at roughly $15 billion.

PhonePe pre-filed a draft red herring prospectus with India’s market regulator and the stock exchanges, the report said. A Bloomberg report from June said the company was planning to go public.

The company, founded in 2015, has more than 610 million registered users and handles about 340 million transactions per day, the Wednesday report said.

One year after its launch, PhonePe was acquired by Flipkart, an India-based eCommerce company that is itself owned by Walmart.

The two Indian companies ended their relationship in 2022, a mutual decision they said would let their businesses expand independently, with Walmart staying on as the majority shareholder for both firms.

Walmart also took part in a $200 million funding round for PhonePe in 2023, which valued the company at $12 billion.

The company’s success is part of the “digital payments journey” that India has been undertaking for the better part of two decades, as PYMNTS reported in June.

“The process was marked by key milestones like the introduction of the instant Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in 2016,” the report said. “The 2016 demonetization further accelerated the transition to digital payments, leveraging the existing trend of Indian citizens using mobile phones for various transactions.”

In 2023, PYMNTS Intelligence examined the popularity of digital wallets, the preferred payment method for more than half of all retail purchases in India.

Meanwhile, there have been several successful IPOs in the financial space this month for companies underpinned by new architectures for traditional financial services.

These architectures digitally transform the same activities that have powered banking for centuries, like moving money, extending credit and settling trades, PYMNTS reported Sept. 15.

“Investors appear to be rewarding that disciplined innovation,” the report said. “Klarna’s IPO priced above the initial range, for example.”