MobiKwik turned profitable in the March quarter and no one can be happier than Upasana Taku, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the fintech firm. Taku expects that MobiKwik will be able to become fully profitable and double its revenue to Rs 1,000 crore in the current fiscal.
While MobiKwik has been an inspiration for millions of start-ups in India, its co-founder’s story is not less motivational. From a Stanford graduate to the creator of a mobile-payment company in the country, take a look at Upasana Taku’s journey here:
Upasana Taku was born in Gandhinagar to a Kashmiri family. Her parents were professors. She completed her schooling in Surat and decided to pursue engineering at NIT Jalandhar.
After that, Taku left to pursue a Master in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University. There, she got interested in entrepreneurship. After graduating from Stanford, Taku worked at HSBC, and later, Paypal. But she was always interested in doing something at the grassroots level. In 2008, she packed her bag and came back to India.
Taku’s return to India left her parents in shock. They tried to dissuade her from leaving her comfortable life in the US. Taku was determined to accomplish her aims. She worked for a non-governmental organisation, Dristhee, as the first step. In an interview with Outlook Business, Taku said that “I liked what they were doing but not how they were doing it. NGOs in India are very poorly run.”
In 2008, some chips fell in place for Taku’s ambitions. In December 2008, she met Bipin Preet Singh, the man who would co-found MobiKwik with her. Singh was working with a Noida-based chip company at that time and was interested in starting an e-wallet firm. In August 2009, Singh started MobiKwik and Taku joined his venture a couple of months later.
Later, Singh and Taku got married.
The couple initially faced struggles in their efforts to make MobiKwik successful. No bank was ready to give them a platform, it was tough to hire employees and funding was low. Taku also faced gender bias as an entrepreneur. But she and Singh managed to beat the odds.
In 2012, Taku created Zaakpay, a subsidiary of One MobiKwik Systems. The platform provides a digital payment gateway for e-commerce firms.
In 2018, Upasana Taku received an award from the President of India for being the first woman to lead a payments startup. She featured in Forbes Asia’s Power 25 Businesswomen list in 2019.
Taku plans to launch a public listing for MobiKwik, but thinks that the market is not right for any tech company to be listed right now, PTI reported. The company was valued at $700 million during a fundraising round in 2021.
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