ZestMoney Gets New Leadership Team, Says Finalising Fresh Funding From Existing Investors

Following the resignation of its three cofounders and top executives – Lizzie Chapman, Priya Sharma and Ashish Anantharaman, ZestMoney has set up a new leadership team to steer the fintech startup.

“As we go on to the next chapters of our own journeys, we are confidently passing the baton to Mohit Chhajer, Mandar Satpute and Abhishek Sharma to lead the company into the future,” Chapman said in a Linkedin post.

“They have all been with us on the journey for a long time, having helped build and scale the company to be the largest digital lending franchise in the country,” Chapman added.

Without revealing the roles and designations of the new leaders, Chapman said that the founders will continue to be significant shareholders in the company.

“We thank the founders for their immense contribution to the company over the last eight years and look forward to building on their success to make ZestMoney a major player in the Indian financial landscape for years to come,” said the new management team in a joint statement.

Chhajer currently works as VP of Finance and FinOps at ZestMoney, while Satpute currently holds the position of chief banking officer at the fintech startup. Sharma is working as SVP growth at ZestMoney.

Besides, the troubled fintech startup also said that it is finalising a funding round from its existing shareholders, including the likes of Quona Capital, Zip, Omidyar Network India, Flourish VC and Scarlet Digital.

The fundraise is expected to close in the next few weeks and will be deployed to support ZestMoney’s future growth and path to profitability.

“ZestMoney has continued to scale effectively since the DLGs were announced in India, and we have been impressed with the company’s progress… ZestMoney’s credit quality remains high and the company is close to breakeven. We are happy to support this next chapter for ZestMoney, which promises to be an exciting one on their path to profitability,” said managing partner at Quona Capital Ganesh Rengaswamy.

The latest development comes a day after Chapman, in an internal email, informed the startup’s employees about the founder’s decision to step down.

“Over the last few weeks, we have done a lot of thinking and it has been hard for us to arrive at this conclusion. We have decided to step down from our roles as CEO (Chapman), CFO and COO (Sharma), and CTO (Anantharaman) at ZestMoney,” Chapman said.

The resignations came almost two months after fintech giant PhonePe pulled out of the deal to acquire ZestMoney. While the Walmart-owned company was looking to acquire the fintech startup for a consideration of $200 Mn–$300 Mn, it called off the deal in March this year citing valuation disagreements and concerns over due diligence as the reasons.

Founded by Chapman, Sharma and Anantharaman in 2015, Bengaluru-based ZestMoney offers BNPL services. It allows its users to pay their shopping bills in three instalments at 0% interest rate. It competes against the likes of Simpl, LazyPay, and ePayLater in the BNPL space in the country.

After the cancellation of the acquisition deal by PhonePe, ZestMoney was looking at absorbing some of ZestMoney’s employees. In a tweet on Monday, PhonePe CEO Sameer Nigam said that his company separately hired 130 employees from ZestMoney and is not looking to hire any more employees from the fintech startup.

ZestMoney saw its loss widen 3X year-on-year (YoY) to INR 398.8 Cr in the financial year ending March 31, 2022. The fintech startup’s loss surged 216% from INR 125.8 Cr reported in the financial year 2020-21 (FY21).

Total revenue grew 1.6X to INR 145 Cr in FY22 from INR 89.3 Cr in FY21, while revenue from operations rose 68.6% to INR 138.4 Cr from INR 82 Cr in the previous fiscal year.

(Update: This story and its headline have been edited to add the company’s statement.)

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