IPO-Bound PhonePe Bets On Transaction Data Monetisation With PulsePro

Since the introduction of UPI and digital payments, fintech startups have amassed a goldmine of transaction data. While these datasets have powered underwriting, fraud detection and internal analytics, PhonePe is now looking to commercialise them as a standalone enterprise offering, potentially opening up a new monetisation avenue ahead of its long awaited IPO.

On Thursday (July 30), the Walmart-backed fintech giant launched PulsePro, an enterprise intelligence platform built on aggregated and anonymised transaction data from its payments network.

“PhonePe serves both consumers and businesses and PulsePro fits right in as an enterprise data intelligence offering. Over time, we anticipate this to become a meaningful revenue vertical,” PhonePe’s strategy head Karthik Raghupathy told Inc42.

The launch comes at a time when the fintech major is evaluating sustainable revenue streams beyond UPI ahead of its IPO. Earlier this week, the fintech major reported that its net loss widened 62% YoY to ₹2,792 Cr in FY26 despite a 12% increase in its operating revenue to ₹7,920.5 Cr.

After filing for a public offering, comprising solely an offer for sale component of over 5 Cr shares, the startup deferred those plans later. While it released a statement highlighting broader market volatility as the main reason for the delay, the company has been aggressively strengthening its business fundamentals before going public.

In this regard, PulsePro could add another layer to PhonePe’s diversification strategy, which in the past has included merchant lending, advertising and financial services.

The launch also signals what could become the next frontier in fintech monetisation, with payment companies increasingly looking to commercialise the vast pools of transaction data accumulated over the past decade.

From Open Data To Enterprise Intelligence

Built on PhonePe’s database accrued from over 70 Cr users and 5 Cr merchants spread across India, the startup believes PulsePro can evolve into a meaningful revenue stream beyond its core payments business.

In essence, the offering is a commercial extension of PhonePe Pulse, its free open-data platform launched in 2021, which is used by startups, researchers, policymakers and academia to study India’s digital economy.

According to Raghupathy, the popularity of Pulse revealed an opportunity to build an enterprise offering around more customised market intelligence.

“Since the launch of PhonePe Pulse in 2021, we have seen incredible adoption by enterprises, startups, academia and think tanks. Especially, post-Covid, we started receiving inbound requests from organisations for deeper and more customised intelligence that can help them form their growth strategies… PhonePe PulsePro is our response to that demand,” Raghupathy said.

Apart from allowing businesses to monitor consumer spending across categories, regions and time periods, the offering is also designed to answer complicated operational questions such as where to open the next store, which districts offer the biggest expansion opportunities, how distribution networks should be optimised, or whether local economic activity justifies entering a new market.

To support these use cases, PhonePe has introduced three enterprise modules:

• Category & Growth Intelligence helps companies track consumer spending patterns, category performance and store format shifts across more than 200 retail categories and over 100 market signals.
• Retail Network Intelligence focuses on expansion planning and distribution optimisation.
• Hyperlocal Intelligence offers district- and PIN code-level insights for site selection, catchment analysis and tracking indicators such as quick commerce penetration.

The platform is primarily targeting large enterprises across FMCG, retail and D2C sectors. Businesses can use the platform as per their consumers requirements, fine tune the outputs as per regional economic activity, identify new markets for expansion and optimise physical distribution networks.

Rather than following a standard SaaS pricing model, commercial engagements will be tailored to each client, ranging from one-off projects to subscription or retainer-based arrangements, Raghupathy shared.

For data privacy, PhonePe maintains that the platform only provides aggregated and anonymised insights and never shares data attributable to an individual consumer or merchants. It claims that the platform has been audited by privacy experts and is compliant with the DPDP Act, with all customised data requests subject to the same safeguards.

The Business Of Transaction Insights

PhonePe said its biggest differentiator from traditional market intelligence offerings lies in the nature of the underlying data.

Unlike conventional market research, which typically relies on surveys and representative samples, PulsePro draws insights from actual transactions occurring across the platform, which account for almost half of all UPI payments that take place in India. This allows enterprises to make decisions based on observed market behaviour rather than reported consumer preferences.

That is a significant distinction. As per market research firm Kantar’s specialist businesses director Puneet Avasthi, the transaction data PhonePe commands offers businesses a near real-time view of marketplace behaviour, enabling them to understand where spending is occurring, how categories are evolving and how consumer demand differs across geographies.

However, he cautioned that while payments data is effective at explaining “what happened” and “where it happened, it cannot explain why consumers made those choices, how they perceive brands or what they are likely to do next.

“The strongest insights emerge when observed behavioural data and consumer-reported insights are used together. As competition intensifies, organisations increasingly want actionable insights closer to real-time rather than relying exclusively on periodic reporting cycles,” Awasthi noted.

The trend is already beginning to play out across India’s digital economy.

For instance, quick commerce startup Zepto launched Zepto Atom, a subscription-based data insights platform that offers brands on its platform access to hyperlocal market share data, minute-by-minute sales metrics, customer retention trends and AI-powered analytics.

Like PhonePe PulsePro, Zepto Atom is positioned as a way to monetise the vast volumes of behavioural data generated on its platform, signalling that data intelligence is increasingly emerging as a standalone enterprise business rather than merely an internal capability.

What PulsePro Means For PhonePe

PulsePro represents PhonePe’s attempt to monetise one its most valuable yet underutilised assets: the vast pool of transaction data generated across its payments network, at a time when it is looking to diversify beyond consumer payments and build new revenue streams ahead of an eventual public listing.

Moreover, the implications could extend beyond PhonePe as India’s largest fintechs and digital commerce platforms sit on enormous volumes of behavioural and transaction data.

If PhonePe succeeds in commercialising these datasets, which have a huge addressable enterprise market, it could pave the way for peers to develop similar enterprise intelligence offerings.

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