When PhonePe files for a public listing, it will not just be testing investor appetite for India’s largest digital payments platform. It will also be offering one of the clearest case studies yet of how global venture capital firms are finding the exit after a bruising reset in tech valuations.
An updated IPO prospectus filed on Wednesday shows that Tiger Global and Microsoft are preparing to sell their entire stakes in the Walmart-backed fintech, while Walmart itself plans only a partial sell-down, retaining control of the company it has quietly shaped into a cornerstone of its India strategy. Up to 50.66 million shares are being offered, creating a long-awaited liquidity event for early and late-stage investors alike.
The structure of the offer is striking for what it leaves out. There are no founder sell-downs. Management is not cashing out. Instead, the selling pressure is coming almost entirely from financial and strategic investors, underscoring how the IPO is being used as a release valve for capital deployed during the peak of the venture boom.
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Tiger Global and Microsoft, two of the most prominent backers of global tech over the past decade, are offering their full holdings. Walmart, by contrast, is selling up to 45.9 million shares, roughly 9% of the company, while keeping its majority stake intact, according to TechCrunch.
This means for Walmart, PhonePe remains a strategic asset; for others, it is time to move on.
PhonePe was last valued at around $12 billion in a January 2023 funding round. The company is now targeting a market capitalization of about $15 billion, a step-up that could allow it to raise as much as $1.5 billion in the IPO, according to people familiar with the matter. In a market still wary of richly priced tech listings, that valuation will be closely scrutinized, particularly given the company’s widening losses.
Founded in 2015 by Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari, and Burzin Engineer, PhonePe was acquired by Flipkart just a year later, long before India’s payments revolution gathered full steam. What followed was a steady, methodical build-out rather than the blitz-scaling that defined many global fintech peers. The company anchored itself in digital payments through the Unified Payments Interface, then expanded into stockbroking, mutual funds, insurance distribution, and even an Android app store positioned as an alternative to Google Play.
That diversification has helped PhonePe entrench itself at the center of India’s consumer internet economy. It is the largest player in the country’s UPI ecosystem by transaction volume, consistently outpacing Google Pay. In December 2025 alone, PhonePe processed about 9.81 billion transactions worth roughly ?13.6 trillion, according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India. Google Pay, its closest rival, handled 7.50 billion transactions worth around ?9.6 trillion over the same period.
Yet scale has not translated into profitability. For the six months ended September 2025, PhonePe reported revenue from operations of ?39.19 billion, up 22% year on year. Over the same period, losses widened to ?14.44 billion from ?12.03 billion a year earlier. The figures highlight a familiar tension in fintech: dominance in usage does not automatically deliver earnings, particularly in a market where digital payments are largely free for consumers and margins remain thin.
The company’s corporate journey also mirrors the evolution of India’s startup ecosystem. PhonePe was spun out of Flipkart after a partial split announced in December 2020, with the separation completed in December 2022. Walmart emerged from that process as the dominant shareholder, doubling down on the view that payments, data, and financial services are central to its long-term ambitions in India.
The exit comes after a period of retrenchment for Tiger Global. Once one of the most aggressive investors in global tech, the firm has spent the past two years trimming exposure and returning capital as higher interest rates and public market volatility reshaped the venture landscape. Microsoft’s decision to sell its stake in full also signals a shift from minority investments toward partnerships more tightly aligned with its core cloud and AI businesses.
PhonePe’s IPO, then, is about more than one company going public. It is a window into how the excesses of the last funding cycle are being unwound, deal by deal, through public markets rather than blockbuster acquisitions. It also raises a sharper question for investors: whether India’s most dominant fintech platforms can convert unmatched scale into sustainable profits, or whether market leadership alone will have to suffice.