India’s Razorpay files for IPO through the confidential route

Razorpay, the Bengaluru payments company, has filed draft papers for an initial public offering through India’s confidential route, according to people familiar with the matter. The filing moves one of the country’s larger fintech firms a step closer to the public markets, without yet putting its financials on public display.

The confidential mechanism, which Indian regulators have permitted in recent years, lets a company submit a draft red herring prospectus to the Securities and Exchange Board of India and the exchanges while keeping business, operational, and financial detail out of public view until later in the process. It buys time and discretion, which is why a string of well-known names have used it.

People familiar with the plans put the issue at between Rs 5,000 crore and Rs 6,000 crore, which at the upper end is roughly $700m, and suggest a listing could value the company at Rs 50,000 crore to Rs 60,000 crore.

Those figures come from sources rather than from Razorpay, and the company has not confirmed them. The size and terms can change before the offer is made public.

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Razorpay was founded in 2014 by Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar and built out from payment acceptance into banking, payouts, payroll, and lending. It was valued at $7.5bn in a December 2021 round, a mark set during the last cycle of large private fintech valuations.

The listing has a longer backstory in the company’s corporate structure. In 2025, Razorpay completed a reverse flip, shifting its parent’s domicile from the United States back to India, a move that carried an estimated $150m tax bill and is a near-prerequisite for an Indian listing. The confidential filing is the next item on that checklist.

Razorpay would join a run of Indian technology firms that relocated their domicile home before listing, a pattern driven by the depth of India’s retail investor market and by regulators’ preference for domestic incorporation.

The reverse flip is the costly part of that decision, since it crystallises a tax charge, but it is the price of access to the exchange on which these companies increasingly want to trade.

The 2021 valuation is the figure that hangs over the listing. At $7.5bn, it was set at the top of the last funding cycle, and the valuation reports now circulating, at the rupee equivalent of roughly $6–7bn at the upper end, would mark a more sober number than the private peak. That gap, between a late-cycle private mark and what public investors will pay, is the question many of this cohort of fintechs are testing as they come to market.

What comes next is procedural. Under the confidential route, a fuller prospectus and the financials it contains become public at a later stage, before the offer opens. Until then, the headline numbers remain attributed to people who know the plans rather than to the company.