Navi, the Indian fintech founded by Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal, has hired banks for an initial public offering of about $315m, according to a Bloomberg report.

It is the clearest sign yet that Bansal’s second act is finally heading for the public markets, four years after his first attempt quietly stalled.

The headline number comes with the usual translation problem. Bloomberg puts the raise at roughly $315m, while Indian reporting frames it as Rs 2,700 to 3,000 crore, a mix of fresh shares and an offer for sale by existing backers.

Kotak Investment Banking is reported to be leading the issue, with a filing pencilled in for the January-to-March quarter of 2027.

The timing is telling. Navi is chasing a listing just as the global fintech IPO pipeline fills up again, with lenders, marketplaces and payment firms all jostling for the same pool of public-market money.

Navi Ltd, founded in 2018 and formerly Navi Technologies, has grown into a sprawling financial supermarket. It offers personal, home and property-backed loans, health insurance, mutual funds and UPI payments.

Bansal is chairman and executive director, Rajiv Naresh serves as CEO of Navi Ltd, and Abhishek Dwivedi runs the NBFC arm, Navi Finserv.

The founder’s story is the sort Indian tech likes to tell about itself. Bansal sold Flipkart to Walmart in 2018, in one of the country’s largest-ever exits, then ploughed much of his personal fortune into Navi, betting that a home-grown lender could do to banking roughly what Flipkart did to retail.

The public markets are not entirely new territory. Navi filed for a Rs 3,350 crore IPO back in 2022 and even secured approval from the regulator, SEBI, only to shelve the plan as tech stocks soured.

That the company is trying again suggests the mood has shifted, or at least that Bansal is betting it has.

Money is already circling ahead of the debut. Dutch investor Prosus is reportedly willing to back Navi at around a Rs 13,000 crore valuation, and a first external equity round is being negotiated.

Valuations for consumer fintechs have proved a fickle thing of late, with even well-funded neobanks made to justify their eye-watering headline valuations when sentiment turns.

The financials, meanwhile, tell a more complicated story. Navi posted a profit of Rs 358.5 crore in the year to March 2024, then swung to a loss of Rs 119.3 crore the following year, the kind of reversal that tends to prompt awkward questions on an IPO roadshow.

There is a regulatory wrinkle, too. In October 2024, the Reserve Bank of India barred Navi Finserv from disbursing new loans, citing concerns over its pricing.

The restrictions were lifted that December after the company remediated the issues, but the episode is a reminder of how quickly Indian regulators can freeze a lender’s core business.

The wider backdrop is a fintech scene that is both hot and unusually crowded. India’s digital lending market is packed with rivals, and even Europe’s most valuable neobank, Revolut, has spent the past year chasing licences and eye-watering valuations to stand out in a field that no longer rewards mere growth.

For Bansal, the appeal of a listing is obvious enough. A successful float would validate the second act and turn a paper fortune into public-market currency, while handing early backers a long-awaited exit.

It would also reset the narrative around a founder whose first attempt to take Navi public ended in a quiet retreat.

The harder question is what investors make of the package on offer. A lender that has just posted a loss, weathered a regulatory ban, and delayed its debut once already is not the frictionless growth story that carried Indian tech listings a few years ago.

Whether the market rewards Bansal’s persistence, or prices in the caveats, is exactly what the roadshow will have to settle.

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