IPO Readiness Assessment

SEBI (ICDR) Regulations, 2018 set the statutory readiness benchmarks an issuer must clear before an IPO can proceed. Regulation 24 requires a Draft Red Herring Prospectus (DRHP) to be filed with SEBI and opened for a mandatory 21-day public comment period before SEBI issues its observations — readiness assessment includes confirming disclosure completeness against this filing standard. Regulation 25 caps the validity of the resulting prospectus (RHP) at 12 months from SEBI's observations, meaning issue timing must be planned within this window once the DRHP clears. Regulation 27(3) read with Regulation 46 further requires securing in-principle approval from the concerned stock exchange(s), within the prescribed period, before listing — a readiness assessment therefore verifies exchange-eligibility criteria are met ahead of DRHP filing, since retrofitting eligibility gaps after filing risks breaching the Regulation 25 validity window. These three linked provisions — Regulation 24 filing/comment period, Regulation 25 validity, and Regulation 27(3)/46 exchange approval — form the statutory backbone against which IPO readiness is assessed.

IPO readiness assessment is the diagnosis of whether a company can go public — tested against the eligibility conditions of the SEBI (Issue of Capital and Disclosure Requirements) Regulations 2018, the listing conditions of the stock exchanges, and the operational readiness of the company itself: the financials and the restatements, the governance and the board composition, the internal controls and the audit, the legal and the regulatory compliance, and the management bandwidth. The assessment answers the question the company must answer years before the filing: what stands between this business and the public market, and what does it cost to fix.

The IPO readiness is not a document; it is a state the company must reach. The ICDR Regulations test the track record of the profitability or the operating conditions, the exchanges test the governance and the compliance, and the market tests the story. The gap between the company's current state and the listed state is the IPO's work plan — and the earlier the gap is known, the cheaper it is to close.

The cost of an unassessed readiness is the year of surprises: the financial restatement that takes longer than the plan, the governance gaps that the SEBI flags, the compliance backlog that the due diligence exposes — each discovered in the process, where the time and the money are the most expensive.

This service is for companies considering an IPO in the next one to three years. We assess the company against the ICDR Regulations 2018 and the exchange conditions, test the financials, the governance, the controls and the compliance, identify the gaps and the costs of closing them, and produce the readiness roadmap — the work plan, the timeline and the priorities — so the IPO process starts from a position of knowing.