PayU Postpones IPO Plan to Next Financial Year Amid Structural Adjustments
PayU, a digital payments platform and a Prosus-owned company, is likely to put off its IPO into the next financial year, said sources with direct knowledge of the matter. The company had initially planned to go public either in 2024 or during the second half of this calendar year, but that plan has been deferred for now. The company is looking at a possible IPO after the first quarter of FY26.
Even though the timeline has been postponed due to the delayed IPO, PayU is already working towards public listing. According to one source, Goldman Sachs had already been selected as a lead banker for the IPO. PayU has been preparing for listing for years and had already received many setbacks when the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) returned its payment aggregator license, citing that the company’s complex corporate structure made it difficult to inspect them easily. PayU regained this license in April 2024 and has resumed onboarding new merchants after facing a temporary ban from January 2023 to April 2024.
PayU supports over 500,000 merchants across payments, credit, and PayTech in India. It has an annualized transaction volume of over $60 billion. It is set to file its Draft Red Herring Prospectus (DRHP) by early 2025.
According to sources, PayU is building scale and wants to expand its footprint as a leading Indian institution. The company has not made any firm commitment to any kind of funding source, though public markets have always been a capital source of great importance in the long term. PayU is on the road to governance, compliance, and operational control en route to profitability.
The revenue growth was reported to be slow for the financial year 2024 ending March at 11% to $444 million. Sources also say the company faced losses. Furthermore, PayU had already announced a round of layoffs in its credit division amounting to about 100 employees due to cost-cutting. Moreover, the number of senior-level employees who have left the company in the last two years is not small either.
There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about PayU even as the timelines are being pushed ahead with such long-term ambitions as scaling operations and going public.
