Walmart’s PhonePe Gets Regulatory OK for Indian IPO

PhonePe, India’s largest digital payments company, is reportedly closer to going public.

The Walmart-backed firm’s initial public offering (IPO) has gotten the approval of regulators, Reuters reported Tuesday (Jan. 20), citing sources familiar with the matter.

These sources said that Walmart, Microsoft and Tiger Global are expected to relinquish part of the stakes in the company as part of the IPO. PYMNTS has contacted PhonePe for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.

PhonePe in September filed preliminary documents via the confidential route for an IPO. Reports at the time said the offering could raise up to $1.5 billion and value the company at roughly $15 billion.

Founded in 2015, PhonePe has more than 600 million registered users and provides payments solutions for close to 50 million merchants.

As Reuters notes, PhonePe is the leading performer on India’s popular UPI payment system, commanding more than 45% of the market by volume as of last month. The company processed 9.8 billion of the 21.6 billion transactions on UPI in August, the report added, citing data from the National Payments Corporation of India.

PhonePe’s success has happened in tandem with the “digital payments journey” that India has been undertaking for the better part of two decades, as PYMNTS wrote last June.

“The process was marked by key milestones like the introduction of the instant Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in 2016,” the report said. “The 2016 demonetization further accelerated the transition to digital payments, leveraging the existing trend of Indian citizens using mobile phones for various transactions.”

In other news from India, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about new findings showing that the country has emerged as the most aggressive adopter of agentic artificial intelligence (AI).

Nearly half the companies surveyed cited the technology as a primary strategic focus and more than 49% of executives saying they expect AI to deliver more than 15% revenue uplift in the next five years.

Singapore is a close second in this category driven in part by competitive pressure, with two-thirds of executives saying they feel anxiety about falling behind if they don’t quickly adopt AI. The findings also challenge the standard assumptions about worker displacement, finding that India leads the world in AI-driven job creation as companies reshape positions around human–AI collaboration.

“Together, the findings suggest that in India and Singapore, agentic AI is increasingly viewed not as a productivity add-on, but as foundational infrastructure shaping business models, leadership structures and long-term growth strategies,” the report added.