PhonePe Limited announced an IP purchase of conversational engagement platform Gupshup’s proprietary ‘GSPay’ technology stack for enabling UPI-based payments for feature phones.
GSPay is a mobile application built “on top of NPCI’s UPI payment solution for feature phones (UPI 123PAY).”
PhonePe plans to customize and extend this recently acquired GSPay IP and launch its own “feature-phone based UPI payment mobile app on new feature phones in India, over the next few quarters.”
PhonePe aims to provide all basic UPI features such “as P2P transfers, offline QR payments, and receiving of money from any other UPI customer to their mobile numbers or self-QRs seamlessly.”
The ambition is to create full payment interoperability “between feature phone and smartphone users and bring crores of Indians who still use feature phones into the Indian digital payments ecosystem.”
Speaking on this acquisition Sameer Nigam, Co-Founder and CEO at PhonePe said:
“We are excited about acquiring the GSPay technology stack and using it to bring UPI payments to India’s extensive feature phone user base. This segment of users has been historically underserved by the digital financial industry and the broader startup ecosystem. We hope we can enable crores of these feature phone customers to participate in India’s burgeoning digital payments market.”
According to industry data, India had approximately “24 Crore feature phone users in 2024, and an additional ~15 Crore feature phone shipments are expected over the next five years.”
This represents a significant opportunity in “bringing users who have so far been left out of the digital payments ecosystem into the fold, thereby driving financial inclusion.”
As noted in the update, PhonePe Limited (Formerly PhonePe Private Limited) is one of India’s fintech companies.
Headquartered in India, its flagship product, “the PhonePe digital payments app, was launched in Aug 2016.”
As of April 2025, PhonePe has over “60 Crore (600 Million) registered users and a digital payments acceptance network spread across over 4 Crore (40+ million) merchants.”
PhonePe also processes over “33 Crore (330+ Million) transactions daily with an Annualized Total Payment Value (TPV) of over INR 150 lakh crore.”
PhonePe’s portfolio of businesses includes the “distribution of financial products (Insurance, Lending, and Wealth) as well as new consumer tech businesses (Pincode – hyperlocal e-commerce and Indus AppStore – Localized App Store for the Android ecosystem) in India, which are aligned with the company’s vision to offer every Indian an equal opportunity to accelerate their progress by unlocking the flow of money and access to services.”
