Former PayU MD Jitendra Gupta joins BharatPe board

Jitendra Gupta, former managing director of PayU, will join the board of fintech firm BharatPe.

Gupta will join co-founders Ashneer Grover and Shashvat Nakrani, Sequoia’s Harshjit Sethi and Beenext’s Teru San on BharatPe’s board, an official statement said today.

A representative from Insight Partners is a board observer, the statement added.

“At PayU, his contribution was instrumental in growing the company to great heights, and BharatPe is just at the stage, where Jitendra's insights and experience can support our next phase of growth,” CEO Grover said.

Gupta stepped down from PayU, a subsidiary of South African media and e-commerce group Naspers, early this month.

Gupta co-founded Citrus Pay with Satyen Kothari (now founder of Cube Wealth) in 2011. Citrus Pay started off its business in three business verticals—payment processing, enterprise payment SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions and consumer payment services.

In September 2016, Citrus Pay was acquired by PayU in an all-cash deal worth $130 million (Rs 865 crore then). It marked one of the largest buyout transactions in the Indian fintech space at that point in time. After the merger, Gupta was asked to lead PayU India’s consumer-facing finance operations. 

“BharatPe is one of the few fintech companies in India creating a truly alternative lending business on the back of UPI acceptance,” Gupta said. “Their focus on merchants and the pace of execution is unprecedented. I am excited to see how BharatPe has been digitising small merchants and truly driving the financial inclusion agenda of the govt.” 

BharatPe was founded in April last year by Grover and Nakrani. Offline retailers can use BharatPe’s app to accept digital payments using QR codes via UPI. Merchants can sign up instantly and can start receiving funds in their bank accounts. 

BharatPe works closely with partner-banks to develop custom application programme interfaces.

The company competes with wallet firm Paytm, Flipkart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay.

Last week, the company appointed Pawan Pathak and Abhishekh Sharma as senior vice president, product and vice president, product, respectively.

In the same month, it appointed former IKEA executive Abhishekh Shah as its new chief marketing officer. Also, BharatPe had recently onboarded actor Salman Khan as its brand ambassador.

In May, the company said it is making a foray into small-value, short-duration loans for merchants by partnering Apollo Finvest (India) Ltd, a non-banking financial company  (NBFC) formerly known as Apollo Mercantile Limited.

In April, the company raised $15.5 million (around Rs.107 crore then) in a Series A round of funding.