Walmart-backed PhonePe shelves as IPO as global tensions shake markets

PhonePe, India’s largest digital payments platform, has put its IPO plans on hold, citing the country’s tensions and volatile stock market.

On Monday, the Bengaluru-based company said it has put its IPO plans on hold, but remains open to going public if market conditions improve. The move comes less than two months after the fintech filed a revised IPO prospectus, targeting an Indian stock listing later this year.

Escalating conflicts in the Middle East have shaken global financial markets and sent oil prices soaring, prompting investors to withdraw from stock markets. Indian equity indexes, the Nifty 50 and the BSE Sensex, have each fallen about 9% in the past month, and hundreds of Indian stocks have recorded double-digit declines since the conflict began on February 28.

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

Recently, however, investment banks working with PhonePe on its IPO suggested lowering that expected valuation to around $9 billion, two people familiar with the company told TechCrunch.

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

“We have suspended the process due to current market conditions, unrelated to PhonePe,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

PhonePe’s IPO was expected to provide an exit from several early stage investors. According to the IPO filing, Tiger Global and Microsoft were set to sell all their stakes, and majority owner Walmart planned to sell 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 grown to become India’s largest digital payment platform. The company leads the Indian government-backed Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ecosystem in terms of transaction volumes, ahead of Google Pay.

In February 2026, PhonePe processed almost 9.3 billion transactions worth about R13.1 trillion (about 141.9 billion), compared to Google Pay’s 6.8 billion transactions worth about R9 trillion (about 97.8 billion), according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

Flipkart spun off PhonePe into a separate company in 2022, though Walmart remained the fintech’s largest shareholder. The company started as a digital payment platform but has since expanded into financial services, offering stock trading and mutual investments, as well as an Android app store positioned as an alternative to the Google Play Store.

In the six months ended September 2025, PhonePe’s operating income rose 22% to R39.19 billion (about $424.4 million) from a year earlier, according to its prospectus. The company’s loss widened to R14.44 billion (about $156.4 million) from R12.03 billion (about $130.4 million) a year earlier, as it continued to spend on expanding its services.