PhonePe gears up for IPO after a decade of dominance in India’s payments space

Walmart-backed PhonePe is commencing preparatory steps in connection with its potential IPO and plans to list on Indian stock exchanges. This marks a significant milestone for the company, which will celebrate its 10-year anniversary this year.

PhonePe, which currently leads India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) market, had last raised funds from growth equity firm General Atlantic at a pre-money valuation of $12 billion.

In Dec 2022, PhonePe re-domiciled from Singapore to India, and subsequently, established a new corporate structure with each of its new non-payment businesses as fully owned subsidiaries. In 2023, it forayed into stockbroking. In 2024, the fintech startup launched the Indus Appstore to take on Google Play Store on Android devices.

PhonePe said it has long aspired to be a public company in India, having been founded here and being a “leader in India’s fintech industry.”

As of January 2025, PhonePe had over 59 crore registered users and a digital payments acceptance network spread across over 4 crore merchants. PhonePe also processes over 31 crore transactions daily with an annualised total payment value of over ₹145 lakh crore.

The public listing plans come weeks after PhonePe Group exited account aggregator (AA) business and surrendered its NBFC-AA licence to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

“We strongly believe that growing the Account Aggregator (AA) ecosystem is very important to addressing financial inclusion properly. By 2022, the AA ecosystem was still very nascent and early adoption numbers were still low. So in June 2023 we got our own AA license in a bid to build our own Account Aggregator platform and help accelerate the AA ecosystem’s growth. This was a departure from our usual strategy of building only end consumer (B2C) products. We feel proud that we have managed to register nearly 5 crore Indians onto our AA platform in less than two years. However, due to competing priorities, we have not been able to onboard as many financial information providers (FIPs) to our platform as we would have liked. The good news is that the AA ecosystem itself is flourishing today, and many of the other players are growing exponentially. Therefore PhonePe Group has decided to exit the Account Aggregator business, and instead we will partner with other AAs in the market,” it said.

Earlier this week, PhonePe announced the launch of a device tokenisation solution for Credit and Debit cards. With this launch, users will be able to tokenize their cards on the PhonePe App and use the card tokens seamlessly across all use cases on PhonePe such as Bill Payments, Recharges, booking travel tickets, making insurance purchases, making payments on Pincode, as well as at Online Merchants where the PhonePe Payment Gateway services are integrated.