Yet its future, including IPO prospects, remains hostage to a legal tangle playing out in French courts.
In a headline-grabbing move, Telegram announced an exclusive distribution agreement with xAI that will embed Grok, Musk’s LLM chatbot, into the platform for one year. The terms: xAI will pay $300 million in cash, as well as equity and 50% of all Grok-related subscription revenue generated through Telegram.
Durov has insisted that Grok integration won’t compromise user data: “No Telegram data will be supplied for Grok training,” he wrote. The deal puts Telegram ahead of rivals like WhatsApp and Snapchat, who’ve struggled to extract revenue from AI features within messaging ecosystems.
Telegram also disclosed its first-ever profit: $540 million in 2024, on revenue of $1.4 billion. This figure marks a dramatic turnaround from prior years, when the company operated at a steep loss. With 15 million paying users and organic growth of 2.5 million users per day, 2025 revenue is forecasted at $2 billion, with profit exceeding $700 million.
For investors, the metrics finally validate Telegram’s long-gestating monetisation model.
The bond’s success surprised some market watchers, especially given CEO Durov’s ongoing legal entanglements. But investors appear willing to price that risk as noise against Telegram’s unit economics and growth profile.
Despite operational momentum, a significant cloud looms over Telegram’s prospects: founder Pavel Durov’s arrest in France in August 2024 and subsequent indictment on 12 preliminary charges, including non-cooperation with child safety investigations.
Durov remains under judicial supervision and is barred from leaving France. A May 12 court ruling blocked his planned trip to the U.S. to meet investors. “We complied with all the binding legal requests we received,” Durov told the WSJ. “Up until this day, we don’t understand what we did wrong.”
The legal case could delay or derail IPO ambitions, raise governance concerns, and complicate global platform operations. It also emphasizes broader regulatory questions about the liabilities of end-to-end encrypted app providers.
Is Telegram now on a glide path to IPO? Possibly, but not inevitably. The bond’s conversion feature suggests that at least the option remains alive. But some analysts argue the high-yield raise could be a bridge or even a hedge, a way to lock in growth without public-market scrutiny while Durov navigates his legal peril.
The one-year Grok integration, too, carries open questions: Will AI subs stick? Can xAI deliver? Will regulators scrutinise the data layer despite Durov’s assurances? And if Musk stumbles, what becomes of the promised $300 million?
Still, with its platform pivot, Telegram has shed the image of a burning-money outlier. Whether it becomes a public tech titan or a cautionary tale may depend as much on courtroom outcomes as on product-market fit.
Telegram’s summer surge, marked by AI monetisation and a bold debt raise, signals a company evolving into a sustainable business. But Durov’s legal cloud may prove the ultimate variable in whether Telegram becomes the next great tech IPO or a cautionary tale of platform governance in the age of encryption.
