MobiKwik Elevates Saurabh Dwivedi To CTO

One MobiKwik Systems Limited, the parent company of payments solutions provider MobiKwik, has announced two key leadership promotions as a part of its effort to bolster core business operations and accelerate leadership innovation.

While Saurabh Dwivedi has been promoted to the role of chief technology officer (CTO), Dhruv Wadhera has been elevated to the role of senior vice president (SVP) for offline payments.

Dwivedi joined MobiKwik in 2023 as senior vice president of engineering for the payments division. Prior to joining MobiKwik, he served as vice president of engineering at MakeMyTrip, where he helped scale the startup’s technical infrastructure. 

With over two decades of experience, Dwivedi has worked on the architecture, design and management of large scale, complex transactional platforms catering to consumer-facing applications. At MobiKwik, he previously led engineering efforts in the digital payments segment, focusing on product innovation and system resilience.

MobiKwik said in a statement that in his new role, Dwivedi will lead engineering efforts across payments, financial services, core platform and infrastructure and infosec. Additionally, he would also lead MobiKwik’s AI assisted product development efforts and enhance the collection efficiency with technology. 

Wadhera has led MobiKwik’s offline payments vertical since June 2023, overseeing its expansion across smaller towns and rural regions of India. Before joining MobiKwik, he held senior roles at Zomato, including vice president and sales director, where he managed P&L operations across north and east India.

Focus On AI Integration

The elevation of Dwivedi comes at a time when MobiKwik is focussing on leveraging AI and deploying the technology as a growth catalyst. During the fourth quarter results for the financial year 2024-25 (Q4FY25), Upasana Taku, executive director, cofounder and chief financial officer at MobiKwik had also reflected on this growth trajectory of the company. 

“Our focus for this year will be to leverage AI as a growth catalyst – to accelerate go-to-market, drive revenue growth, and expand margins through intelligent automation,” Taku said in an earlier statement. 

A number of Indian startups have already steered their plans to use AI as a growth fueling tool. Earlier, travel tech platform MakeMyTrip launched its GenAI feature called Collections, to make hotel and homestay discovery smarter, easier, and more personalised. The feature leverages AI and deep traveller insights to intelligently find accommodations to match customer needs and preferences.

Nitin Jain, cofounder and CEO at OfBusiness also shared with Inc42 in an earlier interaction that through leveraging AI, it was able to cut down its research time to just 35-40 minutes from 4-5 days. 

MobiKwik is weighing its expectations on AI for growth at a a time when the company is falling deep into losses. The company’s net loss for the full period of FY25 stood at INR 121.53 Cr, against a net profit of INR 14.1 Cr in the previous year. The fintech major’s losses have been attributed to less contribution from its lending business. 

MobiKwik was also banking on the introduction of a merchant discount rate (MDR) for generating a new revenue stream. But recently the ministry of finance rubbished the speculations on the return of MDR on UPI payments after which the stocks of the listed fintech took a beating. 

Shares of MobiKwik ended today’s trade 3.38% lower at INR 245.70 apiece on the BSE.