PayPay’s $1.1B U.S. IPO: Japan’s largest listing ever on American soil

PayPay, Japan’s dominant payment app with more than 72 million users, filed for its U.S. IPO on Monday.

Target: up to $1.1 billion on the Nasdaq. That would make it the largest U.S. listing of a Japanese company in history. At the top end of the price range, the valuation would reach $13.4 billion. SoftBank founder Son had originally aimed for $20 billion.

The details

PayPay is offering 31.1 million shares (ADRs) on Nasdaq, while SoftBank’s Vision Fund II is selling an additional 23.9 million. Price range: $17 to $20 per share.

According to PayPay’s SEC filing (April to December 2025): the company posted $656 million in profit on $1.77 billion in revenue. In the same period a year earlier, profit stood at $184 million — meaning it has more than tripled.

Anchor investors include Visa, the Qatar Investment Authority, and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Together, the three will take 10% to 20% of the offering.

Visa and PayPay signed a strategic partnership in February and plan to launch a joint U.S. venture for digital wallets supporting NFC and QR-code payments.

Why Japan’s payment market is so attractive

Since its founding in 2018 as a joint venture with India’s Paytm, PayPay has reshaped Japan’s payment landscape — paying via QR code at checkout instead of cash or credit card.

QR-code payments now account for 9.6% of all cashless transactions in Japan, up from just 0.2% in 2018.
With 72 million users in a country of 123 million people, penetration is close to 60%. Credit cards still account for 83%.

For SoftBank, the deal is part of a broader portfolio reshuffle: between June and December alone, the group sold $13 billion worth of T-Mobile shares to finance its AI push. Now PayPay is next.

The anchor-investor strategy has worked before: during the 2023 Nasdaq listing of chip designer Arm, SoftBank brought in Apple, Samsung, and Nvidia as investors — who were also customers. With PayPay, Visa plays that role.

👉 Sources: Bloomberg, Nikkei