Buy now pay later (BNPL) firm ZestMoney founders Lizzie Chapman and Ashish Anantharaman are launching a new startup called ‘SwiffyLabs’. It is a business-to-business (B2B) fintech company building infrastructure for banks and financial institutions, according to sources. The venture has received backing from Jio Platforms, a subsidiary of Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Industries, according to people familiar with the development.
This development comes almost a month after ZestMoney shut amid an unsuccessful attempt to revive its business under new management and regulatory uncertainty. Chapman and Anantharaman had left ZestMoney in May 2023.
The goal of their new venture is to help financial institutions launch new-age products like embedded finance, invoice financing, and to take advantage of the advancements in artificial intelligence and Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI).
“They have been on a hiring spree roping in tech and product talent,” said a person familiar with the development. “Their LinkedIn profiles indicate they have been hiring aggressively.”
An email query to SwiffyLabs founder Chapman and Jio Platforms remained unanswered.
With the Indian internet economy projected to reach $1 trillion by 2030, DPIs (digital public infrastructure) are primed to continue playing a significant role in democratising this growth and ensuring a digital future that is inclusive and expansive, according to a report by consulting firm Redseer Strategy Consultants.
Anticipating the future, Redseer expects the next wave of DPI-driven opportunities in retail, insurance, healthcare, and agritech. Startups will also combine different DPIs in innovative ways to create totally new offerings or fundamentally improve existing offerings in terms of costs, speed, and experience. This has been accelerated by increased access to smartphones and highly affordable mobile data that benefitted nearly 800 million people.
Startups have been among the early adopters of the ‘digital’ and ‘public’ nature of DPIs. The speed of DPI adoption has helped them scale rapidly and, in many cases, upstage traditional players in their sectors. Redseer’s analyses reveal that DPIs have helped unlock value of over $100 billion in Indian startups across sectors.
ZestMoney, founded by Lizzie Chapman, Priya Sharma, and Ashish Anantharaman in 2015, allowed customers to pay for products over time, but use them right away. Last year in May, ZestMoney’s founders resigned, several weeks after fintech giant PhonePe decided to halt its proposed acquisition of the company. This put the employees at the Bengaluru-based firm in an uncertain future. The deal with PhonePe, which was to fetch between $150 million and $300 million, collapsed. The firm had been finding it challenging to raise fresh capital amid a funding winter, according to sources. In April, ZestMoney had also laid off 100 employees, or about 20 per cent of its workforce.
After three co-founders of ZestMoney stepped down, the Goldman Sachs-backed fintech startup created a new leadership team to lead the firm. Abhishek Sharma, head of growth; Mandar Satupte, chief banking officer; and Mohit Chhajer, vice-president of finance and financial operations (FinOps) assumed responsibility for leading ZestMoney.
At its peak, ZestMoney had a registered user base of 17 million and was live at 85,000 retail touchpoints across India. It had a valuation of $470 million. However, many lenders or Non-Banking Financial Corporations (NBFC) who worked with ZestMoney slowly stopped their engagement with the company after RBI tightened rules for digital lending and norms for personal loans, according to people familiar with the matter.
In a town hall meeting on December 5, the new management told employees that the firm is winding down and laying off the remaining 130 employees. A very small team was retained to undertake the company closing down process.
First Published: Jan 09 2024 | 7:29 PM IST