Fintech unicorn Razorpay is preparing to confidentially file for an initial public offering within the next few weeks. The digital payments company is looking to raise between $600 million and $700 million, with the expected valuation pegged at $5–6 billion — a markdown from its peak of $7.5 billion more than four years ago. Business Today The company declined to comment on the reports. Investment bankers Axis Capital, Kotak Mahindra Capital, JP Morgan, and Citi have been shortlisted to manage the offering. Whalesbook
The confidential filing route allows companies to submit IPO documents to India's Securities and Exchange Board without immediately disclosing financials and other business information to the public. New-age startups like Swiggy, Groww, Meesho, and Zepto have used this method in recent years. NewsBytes For Razorpay, using this path buys time — to refine the narrative, gauge institutional appetite, and respond to SEBI feedback before the scrutiny of a full public filing kicks in.
The timing puts Razorpay in pointed contrast with its closest rival in the payments space. PhonePe, the Walmart-backed payments company, paused its IPO plans last month, citing geopolitical tensions stemming from the West Asia conflict. But the company's decision was also reportedly driven by the fact that the $7 billion valuation offered by public market investors was more than 50% below its on-paper valuation. Business Today PhonePe blinked. Razorpay, by accepting a similar markdown more pragmatically, is choosing to move forward rather than wait for markets to come to it.
Razorpay completed its reverse flip to India in May 2025, shifting its corporate domicile from the US — a move that cost it approximately $150 million in taxes. It also received board approval to convert into a public limited company, a key regulatory precondition for listing. NewsBytes The groundwork, in other words, has been laid carefully and expensively. The confidential filing is the next step in a process that has been running for over a year.
On the financials, the picture is a study in contrasts that investors will need to reconcile. Razorpay reported a 65% year-on-year jump in consolidated operating revenue to ₹3,783 crore in FY25 from ₹2,296 crore in the year prior. The Bengaluru-headquartered company posted a net loss of ₹1,209 crore during the year, weighed down by ESOP expenses and costs related to its domicile transition. Business Today The revenue trajectory is genuinely strong. The loss, however, is a number that public market investors in India have grown increasingly resistant to accepting at face value — particularly in payments, where growth rates across the sector have moderated.
"Growth across the digital payments industry has slowed down, which has impacted Razorpay as well," said an investment banker familiar with the company. "There will be a higher degree of scrutiny on the company's valuation ask and future profitability projections." Another person familiar with the matter put it plainly: "With a number of new-age companies now listed, investors in the public markets are pricing startups more conservatively as the performance of a bunch of them hasn't been great. But if you show exceptional growth while being loss-making, there is appetite for those assets at a particular price." Business Today That last qualifier — at a particular price — is doing a lot of work in the current environment.
Razorpay is currently processing around $180 billion in total payments value, up from $150 billion in 2023 and $100 billion the year before that. Business Today The company processes roughly one billion transactions every quarter, translating to a total payment volume of about $45 billion per quarter. Wccftech Those are large, real numbers — the kind that give institutional investors something to anchor a thesis to even when the bottom line is still red.
The broader narrative Razorpay is pushing alongside its IPO preparations is one of platform expansion. CEO Harshil Mathur has said the company's broader ambition is to evolve from a payments provider into a comprehensive financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Wccftech In March, Razorpay launched an agentic AI studio in partnership with Anthropic's Claude, enabling businesses to automate financial workflows. The company expects the platform to have a significant impact on SMEs, which often lack dedicated operations teams to handle payment-related processes — tasks like tracking failed payments, reconciling transactions, and managing disputes. Whalesbook It's the kind of AI pivot that every fintech is making right now, but Razorpay's merchant network — more than eight million businesses, nearly 80% of which are small businesses, digital-first brands, and startups Whalesbook — gives the agentic AI play genuine distribution at scale.
Razorpay also secured a significant legal win earlier this year when the Supreme Court dismissed the Enforcement Directorate's appeal, upholding a ruling that quashed money-laundering proceedings against the company — removing a regulatory overhang that had complicated its IPO preparations. TS2 With that cleared, the path to listing is structurally cleaner than it has been in years.
The broader context is an Indian fintech IPO pipeline that is crowded but cautiously optimistic. Paytm and MobiKwik are among the major players already listed, while PhonePe, Kissht, and Moneyview are among others in the queue. Investors are increasingly selective, favouring companies with clear profitability timelines and demanding robust regulatory compliance over pure growth stories. TS2 Razorpay's bet is that its revenue growth rate, merchant network depth, and AI-driven platform expansion justify a listing even while it remains loss-making — and that accepting a lower valuation upfront is the price of getting the credibility that comes with being a public company.
For global investors watching India's startup ecosystem, the Razorpay IPO will be one of the more consequential data points of 2026. Not because of the valuation — $5–6 billion is large but not jaw-dropping — but because of what it signals about how India's most battle-tested fintech founders are choosing to play the current market. Accept the markdown, take the listing, and build from a public balance sheet. That's not a retreat. That's a strategy.
