Navi, the fintech group founded by Sachin Bansal, has cleared a regulatory step for its first institutional funding round: the Competition Commission of India (CCI) approved a minority investment by Prosus on Thursday, October 30.
The buyer is MIH Payments Holdings BV, an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Prosus. Navi announced the $100 million (about ₹955 crore) investment on August 19, subject to closing conditions and approvals, including the CCI. Neither side has disclosed the valuation or the size of the stake. The CCI described Navi Limited as the holding company of a group that offers financial services through a single consumer app, and said a detailed order would follow.
When the deal was announced, Prosus said Navi kept its place as India’s fourth-largest UPI app in FY26, that lending assets at Navi Finserv passed ₹130 billion, and that the group reached consolidated profitability in the fourth quarter of FY26. Inc42 reported that Navi may refile its draft IPO papers with SEBI by December, with a fresh issue of about ₹3,000 crore, and has appointed JM Financial, Kotak Mahindra Capital, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan as advisers.
Why it matters: This is Navi’s first institutional equity round, so a shareholder of Prosus’s size gives the company an outside reference investor before it asks public markets for money. Prosus already owns the payments firm PayU in India, which gives it exposure to both the merchant and consumer sides of the market. With the UPI merchant fee still deferred, Navi’s case to IPO investors rests largely on its loan book, and the draft papers will show how much of its profit comes from lending and how much from payments.
Source: Competition Commission of India; Inc42; Prosus
Image: Ashwin Kumar from Bangalore, India, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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