Facts about Sameer Nigam: Cofounder and CEO of PhonePe

Sameer Nigam is the co-founder and CEO of PhonePe, which is an Indian digital payments company. Sameer Nigam, Rahul Chari, and Burzin Engineer founded PhonePe back in December 2015.

Digital payments company which is based on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), PhonePe was embodied in  2015, and in April 2016, the company was acquired by Flipkart(that is owned by Walmart) and as a part of the acquisition, the FxMart license was then transferred to PhonePe, which later on rebranded as the PhonePe wallet. PhonePe then declared Sameer Nigam as its CEO, Rahul Chari as the CTO, and Burzin Engineer as a CRO. Prior to PhonePe, Sameer Nigam has served as the Director of Product Management at Shopzilla Inc, where he made the company's proprietary shopping search engine.

Later he initiated a startup called Mime360, that is a digital media distribution platform. In 2011, Mime360 was taken by Flipkart. After the acquisition, Sameer's journey with Flipkart started.  He worked as the Senior Vice President (SVP) of Engineering and Vice President (VP) of Marketing at Flipkart.

In 2016, Flipkart also took away PhonePe and made Sameer Nigam the CEO of the company. The app is accessible in 11 Indian languages. The app allows its users several services - they can transfer and receive money, recharge phones, DTH, data cards, make service payments, pay at shops, invest in tax saving funds, liquid funds, buy insurance, mutual funds, gold and silver, etc.

The app is licensed by the RBI for the issuance and operation of a Semi Closed Prepaid Payment system.

PhonePe has over approx 35 crores of active users. In 2017, the app beat BHIM to become the market leader in UPI transactions.

In 2018, it became the fastest Indian payment app ever to get a five crore badge on the Google Play Store.

In May 2022, the company declared the acquisition of India-based Wealth Management fund WealthDesk for $50 million and Smart Beta Wealth Management Platform, OpenQ for $25 million.

In 2021, PhonePe achieved two awards at IAMAI India Digital Awards 2021 - Gold for Excellence in Wealth Management (for Mutual Funds category) and Silver for Unstoppable India video.

In the very same year, the company also achieved, the ‘Excellence in Insurtech’ award at Assocham's Fintech & Digital Payments Awards 2021.

Sameer Nigam resides in Bengaluru, Karnataka. Sameer holds an MBA degree from the Wharton Business School (University of Pennsylvania), USA, and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Arizona, Tucson-USA.

 In 2009, Sameer achieved the coveted Wharton Venture Award, bestowed by the esteemed Wharton Business School.