PayPay (PAYP) priced its IPO at $16.00 – $1.00 below the bottom of its $17.00-to-$20.00 range – on Wednesday night, March 11, 2026. SoftBank-backed PayPay, which is Japan’s dominant QR code-based mobile payment app, priced 55 million American Depositary Shares – the number of ADS in the prospectus – at $16.00 each to raise $880 million. PayPay’s IPO was priced during the second week of the war with Iran. At pricing, PayPay had a market cap of about $10.7 billion.
PayPay is the first big SoftBank-controlled company to go public in the U.S. since ARM’s (ARM) huge IPO in 2023.
PayPay (PAYP) stock defied gravity in its NASDAQ debut on Thursday, March 12, 2026 – jumping $3.00 from its IPO price to open at $19.00 at 12:46 P.M. EDT on volume of about 2.72 million shares, according to NASDAQTrader.com. At the time, the major U.S. stock indexes were down more than 1 percent.
Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Mizuho and Morgan Stanley led the joint book-runners’ team.
Of the 55 million ADS, PayPay offered 31.9 million ADS and the selling shareholder, an affiliate of SoftBank Vision Fund II, identified in the prospectus as SVB II Piranha, offered 23.9 million ADS – or about 43.5 percent of the stock in the IPO.
Blue-chip Visa was among the cornerstone investors. Visa is also exploring a collaboration with PayPay in Japan and the United States, the prospectus said.
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Qatar Holding and Visa International Service Association – the cornerstone investors – had indicated an interest in buying up to an aggregate of $220 million of the ADS in the IPO, the prospectus said.
About 16 percent of the IPO was set aside for Japanese investors.
PayPay’s revenue growth was up 26 percent for the nine-month period that ended on Dec. 31, 2025, compared with the year-ago period, the prospectus said.
After the IPO, entities controlled by SoftBank Group Corp. will beneficially own common stock representing about 91.78 percent of the voting power of PayPay’s total issued and outstanding stock, the prospectus said.
PayPay makes money: The Tokyo-based company reported net income of $750.32 million on revenue of $2.33 billion for the 12 months that ended on Dec. 31, 2025.
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