Walmart IPO-backed PhonePe shelves as global uncertainty roils markets

PhonePe, India’s largest digital payment platform, has put its IPO plans on hold, citing political tensions and market volatility.

On Monday, the Bengaluru-based company said it has put its IPO plans on hold, but is committed to going public once the market changes. The move comes less than two months after fintech offered a revised IPO prospecttargeting the Indian stock market listing later this year.

The escalating conflict in the Middle East has rattled financial markets around the world and pushed up oil prices, prompting investors to leave the markets. India’s benchmark equity indices, the Nifty 50 and the BSE Sensex, have each fallen nearly 9% in the past month, with hundreds of Indian stocks falling. posted a double-digit decline since the war began on February 28.

PhonePe, about $12 billion in January 2023, it is looking at a market capitalization of about $15 billion in its IPO, which could have raised about $1.5 billion.

Recently, the bankers who worked with PhonePe on its IPO said they would reduce its valuation expectations to about $9 billion, two people familiar with the company told TechCrunch.

PhonePe said claims that the IPO is being delayed due to pricing concerns are “baseless.”

“We have suspended this project due to the current market situation, which does not support PhonePe,” a company spokesperson said in an email.

PhonePe’s IPO is expected to provide a way to raise funds for several startups. According to its filing for the IPO, Tiger Global and Microsoft had to sell all their shares, and Walmart’s majority shareholder planned to downsize 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 high volumes, ahead of Google Pay.

In February 2026, PhonePe processed about 9.3 billion transactions worth about ₹13.1 trillion (about $141.9 billion), compared to Google Pay’s 6.8 billion transactions worth about ₹9 trillion (about $97.8 billion), according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

Flipkart they spun off PhonePe as a separate company in 2022, even Walmart remained the largest shareholder of fintech. The company started as a digital payment platform but expanded into financial services, offering stockbroking and mutual funds, and and the Android app store which is like an alternative to Google Play Store.

In the six months ending September 2025, PhonePe’s revenue from operations rose 22% to ₹39.19 billion (about $424.4 million) from a year earlier, according to estimates. The company’s net loss widened to ₹14.44 billion (about $156.4 million) from ₹12.03 billion (about $130.4 million) last year, as it continued to spend to expand its operations.