Walmart Shareholding In PhonePe Drops To 85%

US-based retail giant Walmart has seen its shareholding in the fintech decacorn PhonePe drop from 89% to 85% amid the fintech’s $1 Bn fundraise.

In its latest regulatory filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Walmart said, “During the three months ended April 30, 2023, the company received $0.5 Bn related to new rounds of equity funding for the company’s majority-owned PhonePe subsidiary, which reduced the company’s ownership from approximately 89% as of January 31, 2023, to approximately 85%.”

The fintech, which separated from the ecommerce giant Flipkart and brought its domicile to India recently, has raised $850 Mn in primary capital since the start of 2023, hitting decacorn status in the process.

Of the total, General Atlantic and its co-investors have infused $550 Mn in the fintech decacorn. Walmart, Ribbit Capital, Tiger Global and TVS Capital Funds are among the other investors, having invested around $300 Mn in PhonePe.

The decacorn’s most recent funding round came late in May when General Atlantic and its co-investors infused $100 Mn in the Walmart-owned fintech giant.

Founded in December 2015 by Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari, and Burzin Engineer, PhonePe claims to have more than 400 Mn registered users. 

The decacorn is looking to deploy the funds to strengthen its infrastructure, including the development of data centres and to build financial services offerings at scale. It also wants to launch business verticals including lending, stockbroking, ONDC-based shopping and account aggregators in the coming quarters.

While the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has yet to disclose UPI figures for May 2023, PhonePe dominated the segment during April. The digital payments player accounted for 421.6 Cr transactions worth INR 7.10 Lakh Cr.

PhonePe commanded a 50.47% share of UPI transaction value and 47.39% of transaction count in April.

To boost its payments and UPI vertical, the fintech giant recently launched UPI Lite on its platform, a version of the payments network designed to allow users to make payments under INR 200 from their account without entering a pin.

PhonePe was also reportedly part of a recent deposition by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance, along with CRED and Razorpay, on the rising incidents of cyber crimes in the country.

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