PhonePe

PhonePe began as a payments app built on the Unified Payments Interface, the real-time settlement rail that the National Payments Corporation of India switched on in 2016. Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari, and Burzin Engineer incorporated the company in Bengaluru in December 2015, and the app went live in August 2016. The early product did a handful of things: send money to a contact, split a bill, recharge a phone, pay a utility bill, or scan a QR code at a shop. That narrow scope, repeated billions of times, made PhonePe the largest UPI app by transaction volume.

The company's reach owes less to advertising than to two operational choices. It built the app in 11 Indian languages, which mattered in a country where many first-time internet users read a regional script rather than English. And it distributed QR stickers to tea stalls and kirana stores until the blue logo appeared on counters well beyond the metro malls. PhonePe now describes itself as serving more than 700 million users and over 50 million merchants.

Financial services sit on top of that payments base. PhonePe sells insurance, mutual funds, loans, and stock investing through its Share.Market platform, which has been folded under the PhonePe name. A business arm, PhonePe for Business, handles merchant collections and transaction tracking, and a web checkout option covers online purchases. Ownership rests with Walmart, which holds a majority stake acquired through its Flipkart purchase. The company moved its headquarters to India ahead of a planned listing.

Expansion beyond India has been slow by design. PhonePe entered the UAE in late September 2026 after securing payment and card licences there, its first international market. Domestically, the company said in September 2026 that it would hire 20,000 people to extend its merchant network in rural India, and in October 2026 it partnered with Itel so the 2165C feature phone could handle offline UPI payments without an internet connection. Customer support access remains a recurring complaint, judging by the frequency of the phrase PhonePe customer care number in search autocomplete. [edit]