Leadership Exodus Continues At BharatPe; CTO, CPO, Others Resign

Three senior executives from the BharatPe leadership team have put in their papers. Reportedly, Vijay Aggarwal, chief technology officer; Nehul Malhotra, head, PostPe; Rajat Jain, chief product officer for lending and consumer products; and Geetanshu Singla, vice president technology will be moving out of the company to start their own ventures.

“We confirm that Vijay, Rajat, Nehul and Geetanshu are moving on from BharatPe to pursue their entrepreneurial passions. They will continue to ensure smooth transition of their role to the designated leaders. While it is difficult to part ways with these fantastic leaders, we are also proud of them for having taken the entrepreneurial plunge. We wish them all the best, and would continue to cheer for them as they build their next ventures. BharatPe has an incredible leadership bench, and has continued to strengthen and build it over the last 12 months, with key senior hires in Product, Technology, Data Science, Finance and HR,” said BharatPe in a statement shared with Inc42.

BharatPe started the year 2022 with a boardroom spat leading to the resignation of its managing director and board director of BharatPe Ashneer Grover. This was followed by a series of high-profile exits including head of controls Madhuri Jain Grover, cofounder Bhavik Koladiya, as well as founding member Satyam Nathani among others.

In the aftermaths that continued for more than nine months, BharatPe was seen rebuilding itself on all fronts. Currently, BharatPe is led by Shashvat Nakrani, who is now the sole founder of the company, with Suhail Sameer being the CEO.

The existing leadership team is striving hard to fill the vacuum and control the impact driven by such key exits.  In September 2022, BharatPe announced the appointment of two industry veterans to its board as independent directors – B. P. Kanungo, former deputy governor of RBI and Kaushik Dutta, current chairman and independent director at Zomato.

In an  October 2022 Inc42 report, BharatPe claimed that its point-of-sale business turned profitable in two years, with an installed base of 2 Lakh devices and 20% share of all POS transactions.

It also claimed that the company doubled up on the successful last quarter (Q4 of FY22), by facilitating more than INR 3600 Cr in loans in the first quarter of FY23; recording a staggering growth of 112% over the last quarter.

BharatPe also hit an all-time high of $8.5 Bn in annualised TPV – a growth of 50%+ over Q4, FY22. The company facilitated disbursals to more than 1.2 Lakh merchants in Q1, FY23, up from 66,000 merchants in the last quarter of FY22.

The startup also aims to achieve a target of $2 Bn in loans facilitated (through its NBFC/ bank partners) across both consumer and merchant business by the end of FY23 as well as scaling TPV to $ 30 Bn by March 2023.

BharatPe was founded in 2018 and is known for launching India’s first UPI interoperable QR code, the first zero MDR payment acceptance service. In 2020, post-Covid, BharatPe also launched India’s only zero MDR card acceptance terminals –BharatSwipe.

It has raised more than $650 Mn in equity and debt till date from marquee investors such as Tiger Global, Dragoneer Investment Group, Steadfast Capital, Coatue Management among others.

In June 2021, BharatPe announced the acquisition of PAYBACK India, a leading multi-brand loyalty program company with 100 Mn+ members. In October 2021, the consortium of Centrum Financial Services Limited (Centrum) and BharatPe, was issued a Small Finance Bank (SFB) licence by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). BharatPe also made its entry in the Buy Now Pay Later segment with the launch of ‘postpe’ in October 2021.

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