IPO-bound PhonePe shuts US engineering office after four years

BENGALURU: Walmart-backed PhonePe has shut its US engineering office, ending a four-year-old outpost that carried out app and platform work for its India business, persons aware of the development told TOI.The Bay Area team had around seven to eight engineers, one of the persons familiar with the operation said. “We had around 7-8 engineers,” the person said. They worked directly alongside PhonePe’s main mobile platform and engineering teams based in Bengaluru and other Indian hubs.PhonePe consolidated the work after concluding that the office was not producing sufficient results to justify continuing with it, another person added.“They did not see enough coming out of the US operation to continue running it. Consolidating the work was also a way to cut costs,” the person said. PhonePe did not respond to TOI’s queries on the matter until the time of publication.PhonePe announced the US office in June 2022. It said at the time that the unit would initially have around 10 engineers and would work closely with its mobile core team in India. The office was led by Gaurav Lochan, a former Meta engineering leader.Its remit included PhonePe’s Android and iOS platforms, developer tools, code quality, app performance and reliability, software development kits, security and on-device machine learning. PhonePe had said the team would help build the technology needed to serve its next 300 million users in India.Lochan’s LinkedIn profile shows that he left PhonePe after serving as head of engineering since April 2022. His profile says he led the company’s app-platform team across India and the US. He is now an adviser at cybersecurity startup Aucert.The closure comes while PhonePe’s proposed stock-market listing remains paused. The company temporarily halted its IPO process in March, citing geopolitical tensions and volatility in global capital markets. It said it remained committed to listing in India and would restart the process after market conditions stabilised. No revised timetable has been announced publicly.PhonePe’s updated draft prospectus describes an entirely offer-for-sale IPO of up to 50.66 million shares by Walmart-controlled WM Digital Commerce Holdings, Tiger Global and Microsoft. PhonePe itself would not receive any proceeds from the offering.The prospectus showed total income of Rs 7,631 crore in FY25. Its net loss narrowed to Rs 1,727 crore from Rs 1,996 crore in the previous financial year. As of September 2025, PhonePe had 657.6 million registered users, 47.2 million registered merchants and 12,338 full-time employees.The US engineering office was separate from PhonePe’s cross-border UPI service. Its prospectus lists the US among 10 international markets where Indian consumers travelling abroad can use PhonePe. It does not list a US subsidiary and says the company’s revenue continues to be derived from India.The closure also does not mark an abandonment of PhonePe’s overseas ambitions. CEO Sameer Nigam said this week that the company had obtained its first international licence from the Central Bank of the UAE and would make the UAE its first foreign market with local operations. The licence will allow PhonePe to acquire merchants, deploy point-of-sale devices and offer foreign-exchange services.Get the latest Business News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.