PhonePe, a Walmart-backed digital payments company, is moving closer to a public listing after regulators approved its initial public offering. The company filed confidential IPO documents in September 2025, with reports indicating the offering could raise to $1.5 billion at a valuation of around $15 billion. Sources cited by Reuters said existing investors, including Walmart, Microsoft, and Tiger Global, are expected to sell part or all of their stakes through the IPO.
Founded in 2015, PhonePe says it has more than 600 million registered users and serves close to 50 million merchants, with its scale closely tied to leadership on Unified Payments Interface. The report puts PhonePe’s UPI share at more than 45% of transaction volume as of last month and says it processed 9.8 billion of 21.6 billion UPI transactions in August, citing data from the National Payments Corporation of India. That dominance has grown alongside India’s longer digital payments build-out, including UPI’s launch in 2016 and the acceleration of digital behavior following the 2016 demonetization push.
