How Jio got to a $3.2bn IPO in 10 years flat — and what lies next with AI

Mumbai: When Jio Platforms Ltd announces the price band for its initial public offering, it will need to convince investors that its new, frontier digital businesses can justify a valuation beyond what its telecom operations alone would command.

The company is seeking an IPO valuation of ₹11 trillion, or about $114 billion, lower than its earlier expectation of $120 billion–140 billion. Even so, Jio’s proposed primary capital raise of about ₹30,000 crore, or $3.5 billion, will make its IPO India’s largest yet.

Bharti Airtel Ltd, Jio’s closest rival, closed trading on 13 October with a market capitalisation of about ₹11 trillion on NSE. Vodafone Idea Ltd was valued at ₹1.38 trillion.

Jio Platforms’ valuation pitch rests not only on its core telecom operations but also on a wider range of digital services. The company houses Reliance Industries Ltd’s (RIL) telecom business through its subsidiary Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, alongside digital applications, enterprise solutions and, more recently, artificial intelligence-backed services.

The telecom business, however, remains central to its valuation. Reliance Jio Infocomm maintains a cozy lead over Airtel as India’s largest telecom operator, with 508.43 million wireless mobile subscribers at the end of August, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai). Separately, it reported a total customer base of 533.3 million at the end of June, including fixed-broadband and business customers.

That said, the wider Reliance group is investing heavily in AI infrastructure and large language models (LLMs)—AI models trained on vast amounts of data to understand and generate human language. LLMs power AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.

The group is also seeking to build a presence in enterprise AI. In August 2025, Reliance Industries’ billionaire chairman and managing director, Mukesh Ambani, announced the launch of Reliance Intelligence Ltd through a 70:30 joint venture with Meta to develop products for businesses.

In RIL’s latest annual report, Ambani said Reliance Intelligence aims to come up with “sovereign AI capabilities that are designed in India, scaled in India, and made accessible to every Indian—empowering individuals, enterprises, and institutions alike”.

“About 10% of India Inc are firms who are gearing up to be an AI-native organisation and RIL is probably top of the pack,” said an industry executive aware of the AI adoption taking place in the business house that employs more than 400,000 people. For instance, a platform called JioBrain can use AI with 5G and machine-learning tools to spot unusual activity, predict future trends, and automate tasks.

“Then there is also the alliance with Google where every Jio customer has access to Gemini and Gemini Pro. Google pays Jio to bring that product to the customer,” a senior company executive said. (Airtel similarly offers US-based Perplexity AI’s services to its subscribers for a specific period.)

Whether Jio Platform’s initiatives can build a business that its new investors value beyond its telecom operations is a central question for its IPO. Jio Platforms will announce the price band for its IPO on 15 October.

Sounding of the bugle

Mukesh Ambani announced the launch of Jio’s digital services a decade ago, at the company’s 42nd annual general meeting on 1 September 2016. “All voice calls for Jio customers will be absolutely free,” he pronounced. “The era of paying for voice calls is ending.”

In the front row was his son Akash Ambani, then 24, dressed similarly in a black suit, white shirt and red necktie. He was seated between his grandmother, Kokilaben Ambani, the family matriarch, and Manoj Modi, Mukesh’s trusted adviser and friend of more than 40 years.

Mukesh Ambani, then 59, tasked Akash and his twin sister, Isha Ambani—also seated in the front row, dressed in blue—to “acquire 100 million customers on the Jio network in the shortest possible time, and create a new world record”.

That marked the beginning of a decade of upheaval in India’s telecom industry.

The competition failed to anticipate the scale of the disruption that followed when Jio, having skipped the 3G wave entirely, launched its 4G-only services free to subscribers for six months. By the end of that year, just four months later, Jio had 72.16 million mobile subscribers, Trai data show.

Jio bought airwaves in the 800 MHz and 1800 MHz spectrum bands for ₹9,700 crore more than a year before its launch, in March 2015, which helped it build a nationwide network for its 4G services.

Unable to match Jio’s proposition, companies such as Aircel and Reliance Communications Ltd, which was part of Mukesh Ambani’s then estranged brother Anil Ambani’s group, eventually folded.

The industry further consolidated in 2018, when Vodafone India and Idea Cellular merged to form Vodafone Idea Ltd, followed by Airtel’s acquisition of Tata Teleservices Ltd’s consumer mobile business the following year.

But despite the price war triggered by Jio, Airtel has held its ground. Its average revenue per user (Arpu) slipped for the first time in five years to ₹257 per month in the fourth quarter of 2025-26 (January–March 2026) from ₹259 in the preceding three months, but climbed back and ended June 2026 at ₹264. Jio ended the first quarter of FY27 (April–June 2026) with an Arpu of ₹215.6, while Vodafone Idea was at ₹ ₹195.

Both Airtel and Vi, however, trail Jio in subscriber numbers. Airtel had 491.60 million wireless mobile subscribers at the end of August, making it India’s second-largest mobile operator, while Vi had 199.57 million users.

Meanwhile, with an IPO on the horizon, Jio Platforms’ board named Akash Ambani managing director on 9 April, making him the first of Mukesh Ambani’s three children to be appointed to the position.

Telecom 2.0

India’s telecom industry has registered remarkable growth over the past decade, with mobile data consumption increasing nearly 20-fold.

According to Counterpoint Research, low data tariffs, widespread smartphone adoption and a growing ecosystem of digital services transformed consumer behaviour, propelling average monthly data usage from just over 1 GB per person in 2016 to nearly 26 GB in 2026.

“Jio had a role to play in this. It launched not just the network but along with it came a whole gamut of products, including feature phones,” said Tarun Pathak, research director, Counterpoint Research.

The next phase of growth for Reliance Industries hinges on the group’s AI bets, he said, adding that while the previous decade for Jio was about vision and scale, the next will be about expansion and deeper monetisation.

Even after Jio gradually withdrew its free-call offers, its low voice and data tariffs prompted other telecom operators to cut their prices, making mobile services more affordable.

About 267 million handsets were sold in India in 2016, of which 119 million were smartphones, per Counterpoint Research’s data. In 2025, smartphones accounted for about 154 million of the approximately 200 million handsets sold.

The developments had marquee global private equity and strategic investors flocking to India’s telecom sector, particularly Jio.

In 2020 alone, during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Facebook (now Meta), Google, Silver Lake, Vista Equity Partners, General Atlantic, KKR, Mubadala Investment Company, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, TPG, L Catterton, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Intel Capital and Qualcomm Ventures acquired a cumulative equity stake of 32.97% in Jio Platforms for ₹1,52,056 crore. RIL holds a 66.43% stake in Jio Platforms.

These investments, along with a ₹53,124 crore rights issue by Reliance Industries in 2020, helped Jio’s parent company reduce its debt. In June 2020, the oil-to-retail conglomerate declared itself debt-free.

“Jio felt the need to get in some good qualified partners who would add value,” said a senior industry executive aware of the developments at Jio.

Mint interviewed several Reliance, Jio Platforms and industry executives for this report. They declined to be identified as they are not authorised to speak with the media. Spokespersons for Jio Platforms and Reliance Industries did not reply to emails seeking comment.

The making of Jio’s IPO

None of Jio’s investors has opted to sell their stake in the upcoming IPO, which will see the company raising capital through a fresh issue of 270 million equity shares.

In October 2025, Jio had picked Kotak Mahindra Capital Co. and Morgan Stanley India to help prepare for a public market listing through an offer for sale, in which existing shareholders sell their stakes to other investors.

But Jio’s management later decided in favour of an entirely fresh issue of shares as an OFS would have involved multiple rounds of discussions with stakeholders, potentially delaying the IPO, said another person with knowledge of the company’s plans.

“It is not in the company’s DNA to talk to several people and wait for the approvals from various IC (investment committee) of the funds that have invested in Jio Platforms. Hence the decision was made to shift to a purely primary fund raise,” this person said.

According to industry experts, although a large portion of the proceeds from Jio Platforms’ IPO will go towards prepaying Reliance Jio Infocomm’s borrowings, the listing signals the growing importance of the telecom business to Reliance group’s growth.

“We expect RJio to remain the biggest growth driver for RIL—digital services are likely to contribute approximately 80% of RIL’s incremental EBITDA over FY26–28—with an 18% reported EBITDA CAGR over FY26–28,” Motilal Oswal said in a report dated 6 October.

Jio’s net profit in the first quarter of FY27 grew 9.2% year-on-year to ₹7,764 crore, but fell 2.15% sequentially due to higher finance costs and depreciation expenses as 5G network assets became operational. Revenue from operations rose 2.4% quarter-on-quarter and 12% year-on-year to ₹39,173 crore.

In FY26, Reliance Industries clocked a revenue of ₹11,75,919 crore, while Reliance Retail made ₹3,71,085 crore. The telecom and digital businesses brought revenue of ₹1,76,164 crore. RIL’s FY26 earnings before interest, depreciation, taxes and amortisation stood at ₹2,07,911 crore, while ebitda for the retail business and Jio was ₹27,034 crore and ₹76,560 crore, respectively.

In its DRHP, Jio Platforms warned that its ability to drive revenue growth through higher tariffs may be constrained by customer resistance, regulatory intervention and intensifying competition. The document lists around 60 risk factors.

RIL’s shareholders

The question for Reliance Industries’ shareholders is whether Jio Platforms’ listing will translate into returns on the capital they helped finance over the years. As the IPO is a fresh issue, RIL shareholders will get neither cash from the transaction nor shares in Jio Platforms; their benefit, if any, must come through the value of RIL’s remaining stake in the company.

That distinction is important for investors who have waited years for Reliance’s telecom investments to pay off in its share price. The stock has yet to deliver a sustained re-rating on the back of the proposed listing, despite the prospect of Jio Platforms commanding a valuation of around ₹11 trillion.

RIL’s share price implies a discount of roughly 36% to the value of its two-thirds stake in Jio Platforms, according to analysts. The listing may make that value more visible, but visibility alone does not guarantee the discount will narrow.

Shankar Sharma, founder of GQuant and First Global, argues that RIL shareholders may struggle to realise the full value of the telecom investment because the parent’s valuation remains exposed to global oil prices.

Investors consequently would get neither the undiluted benefit of owning a pure-play telecom company nor the full valuation potential of a large energy business.

The IPO could help address this by giving Jio an independently traded market value, but Reliance Industries’ shareholders will continue to own it indirectly, through a conglomerate.

There is, however, a longer-term case for RIL’s shareholders. As majority owner, Reliance Industries retains a substantial economic interest in Jio Platforms, and a successful listing could unlock value and support a re-rating of the parent.

The trade-off is that RIL’s investors cannot directly determine Jio’s dividend policy or claim its distributions. “Promoters hold shares perpetually and their returns cannot be compared with other shareholders who hold the stock for brief periods of time,” said Rajesh Baheti, an independent investor and market commentator. “There will be a generation of shareholders who saw Reliance invest its free cash flows into telecom and not benefit from it.”

The IPO may reward patient investors eventually, but it offers no immediate payout to those who funded the journey.

The Musk factor

In a recent spat on social media, SpaceX founder Elon Musk alleged that his satellite internet service, Starlink, faced delays in India because of a bias towards ‘oligarchs’.

He followed that post on X with several similar ones, but one stood out: “Starlink is licensed in over 165 countries and has spent five years complying with every single law and requirement of the government of India, so why still no license? Is Ambani the real boss of India?”

The Indian government strongly rejected these allegations, describing any suggestion of bias as “baseless and misconceived”.

Musk’s allegations surprised many since Bharti Enterprises-backed Eutelsat OneWeb, Starlink, and Jio Satellite, a subsidiary of Jio Platforms, have secured licenses in India and are awaiting final clearances. Amazon’s Leo is in the wings. Jio aims to launch a constellation of 1,600 low earth orbit satellites. These satellite-based internet services could be crucial for India, connecting remote parts of the country that regular mobile networks cannot reach.

The stage for the rivalry with Starlink was set in Jio Platforms’ DRHP, which highlighted the high installation costs of Musk’s satellite internet service.

“Starlink’s entry level fixed broadband plans in the USA are priced at ₹4,500 ($50) per month, and in most African countries are priced at ₹2,500-4,500 ($28-50) per month,” Ambani’s telecom company stated in its IPO filing. “However, satellite could remain relevant for specialised use cases in remote or hard-to-reach locations where terrestrial roll-out is challenging.”

Musk has vowed to make satellite connectivity affordable in India. Jio’s emphasis on Starlink’s pricing in its DRHP could point to a familiar playbook: rock-bottom tariffs aimed at capturing the market. The battle may have shifted to space, but Jio’s existing investors and those coming in through its IPO will be watching to see whether a third-generation Ambani scion can lead from the front in this new technological frontier.

T. Surendar in Mumbai contributed reporting.

• $115 billion | The valuation Jio Platforms is seeking in its IPO, below earlier expectations of $120–140 billion.
• 508.43 million | Jio’s wireless mobile subscriber base at the end of August 2026, making it India’s largest telecom operator, ahead of Airtel’s 491.60 million.
• 36% | The approximate discount implied by Reliance Industries’ share price to the market value of its stake in Jio Platforms, according to analysts.