This Week in IPOs — India's Two Biggest Deals Diverge
Jio Platforms set a price band below earlier hopes this week while Zetwerk's valuation guidance moved higher — plus a biotech prices and a dental-tech files.
Two Indian IPOs hit milestones within a day of each other this week, and their valuations are moving in opposite directions. Jio Platforms, on track to be India's largest-ever listing, set a price band below the figures bankers had floated a week earlier. Zetwerk, a much smaller contract manufacturer, saw its own valuation guidance move up instead. Both are tracked in Zorro's IPO pipeline, and seeing them diverge in the same week is a reminder that "hot IPO market" or "cold IPO market" is a description of an average, not a rule any single deal has to follow.
Jio's price band comes in below the September hopes
Jio Platforms, India's dominant telecom and digital-services operator majority owned by Reliance Industries, is set to price shares at ₹1,065–1,119 apiece, Bloomberg reported October 9 — a band that implies a market valuation of up to roughly ₹10.3 trillion (around $107 billion) and a raise of up to about ₹30,200 crore (roughly $3.6 billion). That's down from the ₹1,150–1,220 band and the larger ₹37,700 crore raise that Economic Times had reported just two days earlier, on October 7, and well below the ₹11 lakh crore valuation hopes that had circulated when Jio's roadshow first launched in September. Even at the lower figure, the deal would still be India's largest-ever IPO by a wide margin.
The mechanics from here are dated and specific: the anchor book — the pre-IPO allocation to large institutional investors that typically locks in a chunk of the offering before the public book even opens — is set to open October 19. Public subscription runs October 21 through 23, and shares are expected to begin trading October 28. Seventeen banks are working the deal, led by Kotak Mahindra Capital, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs. A trimmed band two weeks before pricing isn't unusual for a deal this large; it's one of the ways a book-building process absorbs investor pushback before it becomes a public embarrassment at the open, rather than after.
Zetwerk moves the other way
Zetwerk, a Bengaluru-based B2B contract-manufacturing platform that handles production and logistics for industrial, electronics and EV components, is heading toward its own price band around October 12, with the offer window targeted to open October 15 and listing expected October 23. The combined offer pairs a roughly ₹2,600 crore fresh issue with an offer-for-sale of close to 97 million existing shares. Zorro's pipeline lists bankers now guiding toward a roughly ₹27,000 crore valuation, up from the roughly $2.8 billion floated when the updated filing went in — though press conversions of that same ₹27,000 crore figure range from $2.8 billion to $3.2 billion depending on the exchange rate applied, a reminder that a single rupee figure can produce a meaningfully different-sounding dollar headline depending on who's doing the converting. Kotak Mahindra Capital leads the syndicate, with JM Financial, Avendus, Pantomath, HSBC, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs also on the deal. Zorro's pipeline data lists ADIA, Norges Bank, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, SBI and HDFC Asset Management among the institutions building the anchor book ahead of next week's price band.
Jio and Zetwerk aren't comparable businesses — one is a telecom giant pricing the country's biggest-ever offering, the other is a mid-sized manufacturer an order of magnitude smaller — but both are testing the same Indian investor base in the same two-week window, and getting different answers. That's a cleaner read on actual demand than either deal's headline number on its own; a single IPO's price band tells you what one company's bankers think the market will bear, but two unconnected deals moving in opposite directions in the same fortnight tells you demand is being priced security by security, not swept along by one market-wide mood.
Elsewhere: a biotech sets terms, a Swiss dental company files
Outside India, two more pipeline names moved this week. Iambic Therapeutics, an Nvidia-backed, AI-driven drug discovery company, launched its roadshow October 8 and set terms for 9,375,000 shares at $15–17, aiming for a Nasdaq listing under ticker IAM. At the top of that range the offering would raise up to roughly $159 million and value the company at up to about $806 million — both well above the $100–135 million raise initially floated when the company filed. J.P. Morgan, Jefferies, BofA Securities and Citigroup are running the book.
vVardis Holding, the Swiss maker of the cavity-fighting dental treatment Curodont, publicly filed a Form F-1 on October 9 for a NYSE listing under ticker VVVV, with Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan leading a syndicate that also includes William Blair, UBS, Deutsche Bank and Apollo Global Securities. Backed by OrbiMed, Heartland Dental and funds affiliated with Apollo Global Management, the Zug-based company posted $28.6 million in revenue against a $27.8 million net loss for the first half of 2026 — both roughly tripled from the same period a year earlier. No price range or share count has been set yet; the company was valued above $1 billion in an April 2026 funding round, and a Swiss financial outlet has reported investors expecting the IPO to value it closer to $3–4 billion.
Four companies, four different stages: one trimming its ask two weeks from pricing, one raising its ask a week and a half out, one with fresh terms on the table, and one that just turned its filing public. Once any of them actually lists, it moves from the pipeline into the recent-IPOs tracker — the same path GCash and Firmus Technologies are mid-way through right now after opening their own books earlier this month.