PhonePe, India’s biggest digital payments platform, has put its IPO plans on hold, citing geopolitical tensions and a volatile stock market.

On Monday, the Bengaluru-based company said it had paused its IPO plans, but remains committed to going public once market conditions improve. The move comes less than two months after the fintech filed an updated IPO prospectus, targeting a listing on Indian stock exchanges later this year.

Escalating tensions in the Middle East have rattled global financial markets and pushed oil prices higher, prompting investors to retreat from stock markets. India’s benchmark equity indexes, the Nifty 50 and BSE Sensex, have each fallen about 9% over the past month, and hundreds of Indian stocks have recorded double-digit declines since the conflict started on February 28.

PhonePe, valued at about $12 billion in January 2023, was targeting a market capitalization of around $15 billion in its IPO, which could have raised as much as $1.5 billion.

More recently, however, investment bankers working with PhonePe on its IPO had suggested lowering its valuation expectations to about $9 billion, two people familiar with the company told TechCrunch.

PhonePe said any claims that the IPO is being paused due to valuation concerns are “baseless.”

“We paused the process only because of the current market conditions, which are unrelated to PhonePe,” a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

PhonePe’s IPO was expected to provide an exit for several early investors. According to its IPO filing, Tiger Global and Microsoft were set to sell their entire stakes, and majority owner Walmart planned to offload up to 45.9 million shares, or about 9% of the company, while retaining control.

Founded in 2015 by Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari, and Burzin Engineer, PhonePe was acquired by e-commerce giant Flipkart a year later, and has since grown into India’s largest digital payments platform. The company leads the Indian government-backed Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ecosystem in transaction volumes, ahead of Google Pay.

In February 2026, PhonePe processed about 9.3 billion transactions worth roughly ₹13.1 trillion (about $141.9 billion), compared with Google Pay’s 6.8 billion transactions worth around ₹9 trillion (around $97.8 billion), according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

Flipkart spun PhonePe out into a separate company in 2022, though Walmart remained the fintech’s biggest shareholder. The company began as a digital payments platform but has since expanded into financial services, offering stockbroking and mutual fund investments, as well as an Android app store that’s positioned as an alternative to Google’s Play Store.

In the six months ended September 2025, PhonePe’s revenue from operations rose 22% to ₹39.19 billion (about $424.4 million) from a year earlier, according to its prospectus. The company’s loss widened to ₹14.44 billion (around $156.4 million) from ₹12.03 billion (about $130.4 million) a year earlier, as it continued to spend on expanding its services.

In a surprise launch on Monday, Apple unveiled the AirPods Max 2, the long-awaited successor to its premium headphones that launched in 2020.

The Max 2 cost $549, and feature active noise cancellation, Apple’s audio-specific H2 chip, support for live translation, better sound quality, and more. The headphones will be available for preorder starting March 25, in midnight, starlight, orange, purple, and blue colors, and will be available early next month.

Apple says the new headphones’ active noise cancellation (ANC) is up to 1.5x more effective than their predecessor. And the Adaptive Audio feature lets the headphones automatically adjust the levels of ANC and Transparency based on the user’s surroundings to optimize the listening experience.

The company says Transparency mode is now more natural, thanks to a new digital signal-processing algorithm optimized for the H2 chip and the AirPods Max microphone array, so users can stay aware of their surroundings and the people around them.

The headphones come with Live Translation, which helps users communicate across languages in person. They also feature voice isolation, which uses “advanced computational audio” to prioritize your voice during calls and block out ambient noise.

Apple says the AirPods Max 2 has a new, high-dynamic-range amplifier for cleaner audio, and Spatial Audio is said to be better, with improved localization of instruments, better bass response, and natural mids and highs.

The headphones also support Camera Remote, a feature that lets you trigger the iPhone or iPad’s camera shutter from a distance. On the Max 2, you press the Digital Crown to take a photo, or start and stop video recording in the Camera app, or compatible third-party camera apps on iPhone or iPad.

Additionally, Apple says the headphones’ Loud Sound Reduction feature helps protect users from loud environmental noise while preserving the sound signature of what they’re listening to.

Apple says the headphones’ mic allows interviewers, podcasters, singers, and other creators to capture content with higher-quality audio and more natural vocal texture.

The AirPods Max 2 support 24-bit, 48 kHz lossless audio when used with the included USB-C cable.

The Airpods Max 2 will be available in more than 30 countries and regions.

Shopify is preparing for the transformation of a lifetime, according to its president, Harley Finkelstein. Speaking at this year’s Upfront Summit in Los Angeles, the longtime e-commerce veteran spoke about how the company is going all in on agentic shopping. 

Shopify is the second-largest e-commerce provider in the U.S. behind Amazon. But Finkelstein says that only about 18% of retail purchases in the U.S. are made online. Agentic can change that, acting as a new front door for e-commerce sellers.

“We’re going to begin to use these agentic applications as these kinds of personal shoppers,” he said, adding that the initial rollout will be slow. Agentic personal shoppers are predicted to be the future of shopping in some ways — able to discover, buy, and compare products for consumers more effectively. 

Finkelstein said that agents will bring context to shopping, which is not something traditional search engines do well at the moment. He offered the example of searching for athletic shoes. One of his favorite brands, he said, is On.

“Agentic is fundamentally merit-based as opposed to, if you go to a search engine, you type sneakers, you’re going to see Footlocker,” he said. But once his agentic shopper knows his preference for On running shoes, the next time he searches for such shoes, the agent will do a better job of representing options from On, rather than options sold at popular, mass retailers like Footlocker. 

This is, we’d point out, a bit simplistic. Current search engines already tailor shopping or search displays toward a person’s search and browsing history.

But it is also true that agentic shopping should one day be able to take the person’s preferences into consideration at a much higher level.

“We’re still going to be influenced by the people we see, the people we watch on social media, on television, but I think the chat application is actually a more authentic personal shopper because it’s generally not on commission,” he said, “meaning it’s only going to show you the things it thinks you are most likely to purchase.”

He added there are a lot of merchants on Shopify that struggle with having their products discovered, “and actually, this is where we think agentic will play a huge role in surfacing new brands to those customers.” 

He said Shopify is currently building an AI assistant for merchants called Sidekick. It is also building an agent to handle support issues and a protocol so agents can better understand merchant data, such as product details. Overall, he thinks agentic shopping will be another spoke on the retail operating machine. 

“We’re probably more excited about this particular new era of commerce than we have ever been because we think it’s just going to create so much opportunity,” he said, “not just for the large merchants, but for the long tail of merchants.”