Owner of an estimated fortune of US$90.5 billion and the second richest man in India , businessman Mukesh Ambani is the name behind what could be the largest IPO of a company in the country's capital market.
Jio Platforms, a mobile phone operator and digital services provider controlled by Reliance Industries , a conglomerate led by the businessman, filed its preliminary application for an initial public offering of shares on the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) this Friday, June 19.
The offering foresees the issuance of up to 270 million shares of the company. According to sources cited by Reuters , the company plans to raise approximately US$3.8 billion, which would surpass the US$3.3 billion mark registered by Hyundai Motor India in October 2024.
“Jio’s proposed IPO will show the world that India can build technology companies with global scale, global capacity, and global value,” Ambani said during Reliance Industries’ annual meeting on Friday.
Besides Reliance itself, which holds a 66% stake in the operation, Jio Platforms has two major American tech companies among its shareholders: Mark Zuckerberg's Meta , with a stake of approximately 10%, and Google , with 7.7%.
With an eye on the potential of the Indian digital economy, the two American giants invested in Jio Platforms in 2020, five years after the company's founding. The investment firm Vista Equity Partners is another global name among the company's shareholders, which was once valued at US$180 billion by Jefferies.
Other figures help explain the expectations surrounding the listing. Jio Platforms owns 100% of the operations of Reliance Jio Infocomm, a fixed and mobile internet provider in India, which has more than 526 million subscribers in the country, translating to almost 50% of that market.
For comparison, Bharti Airtel, which ranks second in this list with approximately a 35% market share, is the third most valuable company in the country, with a market capitalization of US$120 billion.
Reliance Jio Infocomm is precisely one of the areas through which Jio Platforms intends to advance following its IPO and compete with a major global player. The company is evaluating the implementation of a low-Earth orbit satellite network in the country.
“Jio connected India by land. Now, we need to connect India by air,” said Akash Ambani, chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm, director of Jio Platforms and eldest son of the Indian billionaire, according to the American network CNBC .
Interestingly, these plans connect to another recent record-breaking IPO. This segment is precisely the area of operation for Starlink , one of the business arms of Elon Musk's SpaceX, which debuted on Nasdaq this week after raising US$75 billion and being valued at US$1.77 trillion.
In 2025, SpaceX announced agreements with Jio and Bharti Airtel to implement Starlink services throughout India. However, since then, progress on the project has been slow, and the company has yet to launch its service in the country.
Last week, Bloomberg reported that the Indian government had suspended approvals for the service to begin, citing security concerns. This was denied by Lauren Dreyer, the company's vice president of commercial operations, in a post on X.
Aside from that discussion, Akash Ambani stated that Reliance Jio Infocomm is forging partnerships with major global providers to lease satellite capacity, with the goal of rapidly launching these services.
At the same time, he emphasized that the company will also build its “own long-term sovereign capacity.” And that, in parallel, the company will erect the ground infrastructure to support the low-Earth orbit satellite networks of these partners, as well as its own services.
However, this is not the only area of focus for the Indian group. After revolutionizing the local market with low-cost mobile data plans, in recent years Jio Platforms and Reliance have invested in expanding their reach into segments such as artificial intelligence (AI) and digital infrastructure.
As part of this context, Meta announced this month that it would lease capacity in a data center dedicated to artificial intelligence that is being built by the conglomerate in the western state of Gujarat, with a planned capacity of 168 megawatts.
Since becoming a partner of Jio in 2020, Mark Zuckerberg's company has been strengthening its relationship with the firm, resulting in joint projects to make Meta's AI models more accessible to the Indian market.
While Jio Platforms moves into these new areas, the company's IPO carries other reasons that fuel market expectations. Plans for the offering were announced in 2025 and indicated a listing for the first half of this year.
The IPO was postponed, however, due to the start of the war between the United States and Iran, which shook investor confidence and delayed other initial public offerings of shares on the country's stock exchange, whose capital market has accumulated a decline of more than 9% in 2026.
In this context, Jio Platforms' initial public offering (IPO) is being closely watched by investors, who see it as a major test for potential future offerings after months of volatility in the local capital market.
Aside from these expectations, and at the helm of Reliance Industries, Mukesh Ambani continues to manage an empire that extends far beyond telecommunications. Among other ventures, the holding company has businesses ranging from oil and petrochemical production and refining to retail companies.
