Founders of PhonePe Parent Company Rahul Chari and Sameer Nigam

PhonePe is India’s largest payment app, enabling digital inclusion for consumers and merchants. With 43.5 crore registered users, one in four Indians uses the app.

After announcing a complete separation from parent company Flipkart Group, the digital payments firm has raised $350 million in a new round led by private equity firm General Atlantic. The deal is part of up to $1 billion in fundraising the company hopes to complete in the coming months.

Founded by Sameer Nigam

Sameer Nigam is the founder of PhonePe, a UPI-based online payments firm. He is a graduate of Computer Engineering from the University of Mumbai and has an MBA in Entrepreneurship from the Wharton Business School, USA.

He founded his first venture, Mime360, in 2009, which was later acquired by Flipkart. He is an entrepreneur at heart and loves problem-solving.

Currently, he is the CEO of PhonePe and serves on its Board of Directors. He has worked with several companies and is skilled in product marketing, e-commerce, team management, digital marketing, non-medical homecare, lead generation, and strategic partnerships.

PhonePe, which Walmart and Flipkart back, has been able to expand rapidly over the past few years, driven by the Indian market’s growing adoption of digital payment. It has over 400 million users and is on the verge of becoming a profitable company by 2022. Its services enable merchants to accept payments through all UPI-based apps, debit and credit cards, and wallets.

Founded by Rahul Chari

Founder of phonepe parent company Rahul Chari has always dared to follow his convictions, be it choosing a course he was genuinely passionate about, leaving an MNC job for one at a startup, or giving up a corporate career altogether. Today, he is a force to reckon with in the Indian startup ecosystem as the founder of the digital payments app PhonePe.

Previously, he was with Cisco Systems, leading a team that developed the market-changing MDS 9000 family of SAN switches. He also worked on storage virtualization-related patents.

At PhonePe, he has built web-scale infrastructure that includes the company’s internal IT, application engineering, cloud systems, network, storage, and CDN. He has over two decades of experience in SAN switching and SAN-based storage services.

Founded by Burzin Engineer

PhonePe is a payment app that Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari, and Burzin Engineer started in 2015. Its goal is to make digital payments easy, safe & universally accepted.

It is a UPI-based app which allows users to transfer money from one bank account to another, pay bills, and recharge their mobile phones. It also sells products like groceries, insurance, and food.

Founded in 2015, PhonePe was acquired by Flipkart a year after its launch. It ushered in an era of growth and expansion for the company.

The company’s total valuation is estimated at around $5.5 billion. Its major investors include Flipkart, Walmart, Tiger Global Management, General Atlantic, Ribbit Capital, and TVS Capital.

Founded by Flipkart

The founder of PhonePe is Sameer Nigam, who started the digital payments platform in 2015 after having worked at Flipkart for over four years. Before founding PhonePe, he served as Flipkart’s senior vice president of engineering and marketing.

Sameer graduated with a computer engineering degree from DPS Noida, India, and got an MBA from Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania, USA. He also earned a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Arizona, Tucson-USA.

His career at Flipkart began in 2011 when it acquired his earlier startup, Mime360. He built its proprietary shopping search engine during that time, winning the Wharton Venture Award.

As Flipkart separates from PhonePe, the e-commerce firm will sell its shareholding in the digital payment platform to independent shareholders led by Walmart. This partial spin-off will value the firm at $5.5 billion.