Walmart-backed PhonePe shelves IPO as global tensions rattle markets | TechCrunch

PhonePe, India’s biggest 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 paused its IPO plans, but remains committed to going public once market conditions improve. The move comes less than two months after the fintech filed an updated IPO prospectus, targeting a listing on Indian stock exchanges later this year.

Escalating tensions in the Middle East have rattled global financial markets and pushed oil prices higher, prompting investors to retreat from stock markets. India’s benchmark equity indexes, the Nifty 50 and BSE Sensex, have each fallen about 9% over the past month, and hundreds of Indian stocks have recorded double-digit declines since the conflict started on February 28.

PhonePe, valued at about $12 billion in January 2023, was targeting a market capitalization of around $15 billion in its IPO, which could have raised as much as $1.5 billion.

More recently, however, investment bankers working with PhonePe on its IPO had suggested lowering its valuation expectations to about $9 billion, two people familiar with the company told TechCrunch.

PhonePe said any claims that the IPO is being paused due to valuation concerns are “baseless.”

“We paused the process only because of the current market conditions, which are unrelated to PhonePe,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

PhonePe’s IPO was expected to provide an exit for several early investors. According to its IPO filing, Tiger Global and Microsoft were set 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 roughly ₹13.1 trillion (about $141.9 billion), compared with Google Pay’s 6.8 billion transactions worth around ₹9 trillion (around $97.8 billion), according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

Flipkart spun PhonePe out into a separate company in 2022, though Walmart remained the fintech’s biggest shareholder. The company began as a digital payments platform but has since expanded into financial services, offering stockbroking and mutual fund investments, as well as an Android app store that’s positioned as an alternative to Google’s Play Store.

In the six months ended 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 loss widened to ₹14.44 billion (around $156.4 million) from ₹12.03 billion (about $130.4 million) a year earlier, as it continued to spend on expanding its services.