Upasana Taku left a banking career in the United States and started MobiKwik from a living room in Delhi with her husband Bipin Preet Singh. Fifteen years later the company listed on the Indian exchanges, after two attempts at a public issue and a long stretch of losses. She is one of very few Indian women to co-found and then chair a listed payments company.
Last edited 15 October 20263 revisions16 sourcesReading time 28 min
Timeline
Before 2000Grows up in a family that expected a settled professional career rather than a business of its own, a background she has described in interviews about leaving her job.No date of birth or hometown has been published
Early 2000sStudies at Stanford University in the United States.Her own account, given to The Economic Times
After StanfordJoins HSBC, where her first brief is to examine the profitability of different product lines at the bank's California business.She has said she stayed in that first job longer than she should have
Mid 2000sWorks in banking and payments in the United States and describes a comfortable corporate career that she walked away from.
2008Returns to India and, with Bipin Preet Singh, plans a payments company while the two are also building a life together.The two married and became business partners
2009MobiKwik is founded by the husband and wife duo, working from a living room in Dwarka, Delhi, with a website that offers a closed wallet.She has said the company was started on her living room floor
2009 to 2014The company is bootstrapped, with the founders funding the business themselves for the first four to five years.She has described this as the period of being told no repeatedly
2012MobiKwik launches a digital wallet system that lets users deposit money online for bill payments and other services.
2013The Reserve Bank of India authorises the company's semi-closed wallet, one of the first such approvals in the country.
2014The company starts partnering with international firms, including GoDaddy, to help them comply with Indian payment regulations.
2015MobiKwik claims 15 million users and raises a 25 million dollar Series B round from Tree Line Asia, Sequoia Capital, Cisco Systems and American Express.
2016A 50 million dollar Series C round is announced, led by GMO Internet and MediaTek, with existing investors taking part, and small consumer loans are added to the wallet.
2016MobiKwik Lite is launched for users on older 2G networks in places with poor connectivity.
2016Demonetisation removes high value banknotes from circulation and the company reports a fourfold jump in transactions on its platform.
2017Bajaj Finance buys a 10.83 per cent stake in the company for 225 crore rupees.
2019MobiKwik expands beyond the wallet into loans, insurance and investment advice, and announces an international partnership with DT One.
2020The company is briefly removed from the Google Play Store over an advertising policy matter and reinstated within days.
2021Security researchers allege that the records of about 10 crore users are being offered for sale on the dark web, a claim the company denies and says it will fight in court.
2021Abu Dhabi Investment Authority pays about 20 million dollars for a 2.7 per cent stake, valuing the company at over 700 million dollars.
2021MobiKwik is described as a unicorn after a secondary share sale, and files draft papers for a 1,900 crore rupee public issue.
2021The public issue is put aside after a weak debut by another payments company, with the chief executive saying the company would wait for a better market.
2023The company reports its first profit at the operating level, closes the year with net revenue of about 560 crore rupees and says it expects revenue to double.She announced the numbers in an interview
2024A fresh draft for a smaller 700 crore rupee issue is filed, and the market regulator gives its approval later in the year.
2024The 572 crore rupee issue opens in December, is subscribed about 17 times by the second day and lists on 18 December.
2024MobiKwik suspends instant withdrawals on its Xtra peer to peer lending product after new central bank rules, drawing complaints from users.
2026She remains the company's chairperson, running a listed business with over 160 million users and about 4 million merchants.
Early life, education and the road back to India
Very little about Upasana Taku's early life is in the public record, and this page will not fill the gaps with guesses. No date of birth, no hometown and no family detail appears in the company's public filings or in the interviews she has given, and the only Wikidata item that exists for her carries her name, the description founder of MobiKwik and nothing else [1].
The part she has spoken about herself is her education and her first years of work. In an interview with The Economic Times she said that after Stanford she was hired at HSBC, where she was given the brief of looking into the profitability of different product lines at the bank's California business, measuring their performance and their other metrics, and that the training period taught her that textbooks are for concepts and that the trade itself has to be learned on the job [2].
She has also been honest about the mistake in that first stretch. Her own verdict on the HSBC years is that she stuck around too long, that a first job exists for learning and for testing your own potential and that after that a person has to weigh the growth on offer and decide whether to stay. That instinct, that a comfortable job can be a slow trap, is the reason she gives for the decision that followed [2].
The decision itself came in the middle of the last decade, when she left a settled career in banking in the United States and came back to India to build a payments company. She has described the reaction at home as resistance rather than applause, and the early days of the company as improvised. In an interview with Moneycontrol around the company's first public issue she said she had to fight with her parents to leave a comfortable job at PayPal in the United States and start a company from her living room [3].
Founding MobiKwik in 2009 with Bipin Preet Singh
MobiKwik was founded in 2009 by the husband and wife duo of Bipin Preet Singh and Upasana Taku. Singh, a 2002 graduate of IIT Delhi, seeded the company, built the website and the payment options himself and rented office space in Dwarka, Delhi. The first service was a website with a closed wallet facility, which means money could be loaded and spent inside the system but not moved out to a bank account [1].
Taku's own description of the beginning is domestic and unglamorous, and she repeats it deliberately: the company started on her dining table and then her living room floor in Dwarka, and the founders spent the first four to five years funding it themselves. Bootstrapping a payments business in a country where digital payments were still a novelty meant the company grew on revenue rather than on capital, which is the habit that later kept its burn rate lower than its rivals' [3].
The two roles that emerged from those years have stayed in place. Singh runs the product, the engineering and the regulatory relationship as managing director and chief executive, while Taku has run operations and finance, serving as chief operating officer for most of the company's life and, by the time of the listing, as chairperson and chief financial officer [1][14].
The founding pair also brought the company an unusual public profile, because the wife and husband who started it were both visible in the same business. Indian fintech in 2009 was dominated by male engineering founders, and a payments company run by a couple, both in the decision making room, was unusual enough that the press treated it as a story in itself [1][3].
The wallet years: the RBI licence, users and demonetisation
The company's first real break came from regulation rather than from marketing. In 2013 the Reserve Bank of India authorised MobiKwik's semi-closed wallet, which allowed it to hold customer money under the central bank's rules. That licence turned the website into a product people could trust with a balance, and it opened the door to partnerships with e-commerce merchants that wanted a payment option beyond cards and net banking [1].
Growth after that was measured in users and in merchant tie-ups. In 2012 MobiKwik launched a wallet that let users deposit money for bill payments, and by April 2015 the company was claiming 15 million users. A partnership approach followed, in which the wallet was offered as a payment option on other people's websites rather than only on its own [1].
The largest single jump came in November 2016, when the government withdrew high value banknotes and digital payments in India spiked almost overnight. MobiKwik reported a fourfold increase in transactions on its platform by the end of that December. The company had a product ready for exactly that moment, including MobiKwik Lite, an app launched in November 2016 for older 2G phones and poor connections, which let users download the app with a missed call and sign up with only a mobile number, with no email address required [1][4].
The wallet years also built the shape of the company's customer base. Its users were concentrated among people who were not heavy credit card users, in cities smaller than the metros, buying phone recharges, paying electricity bills and sending small amounts of money. That base is the reason the company was able to build a lending and financial distribution business on top of a payments app a decade later [1].
The funding ladder: Sequoia, American Express and Bajaj Finance
After five years of funding itself, MobiKwik raised outside money in the middle of the last decade, and the investor list reads like a map of the period. A 25 million dollar Series B round in 2015 brought in Tree Line Asia, Sequoia Capital, Cisco Systems and American Express. A 50 million dollar Series C round followed in May 2016, led by GMO Internet and MediaTek with the existing investors taking part [1].
The next large cheque came from strategic money rather than a venture fund. In August 2017 Bajaj Finance bought 10.83 per cent of the company for 225 crore rupees, a deal that tied a consumer lending giant to a payments platform four years before the rest of the market started talking about that combination [1].
Taku's own summary of the funding history is that the company raised far less than its competitors and had to make the money last. In an interview at the time of the issue she said that MobiKwik had raised only around 1,200 crore rupees in total across its life, a fraction of what the larger wallets had spent, and that the company had grown while keeping its fixed costs in the range of 220 to 230 crore rupees a year, which fell from about 47 per cent of revenue to about 30 per cent as revenue rose [14].
That frugality has a cost as well as a benefit. On many measures, including total payment volume and merchant reach, MobiKwik stayed behind the wallets that spent aggressively in those years, which is how a company that was early to the market ended up as a challenger rather than a leader [1][4].
The money: revenue, losses and the first profitable quarter
The financial record of the company is the story of a business that grew quickly while losing money, and then spent three years turning that around. Net revenue in the year to March 2020 was about 379 crore rupees, up 134 per cent on the previous year, and the company said at the time that it was looking at profits in the following year [5].
Profit did not arrive on that schedule. The company closed the year to March 2024 with an operating revenue of about 875 crore rupees, up 62 per cent, and a net profit of about 14 crore rupees, its first full year in the black and a milestone it announced with the number of users and merchants attached to it [6].
Taku described the same year in slightly different terms in an interview at the time of the public issue. Her account is that revenue grew 59 per cent from the year before to about 890 crore rupees, with earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of about 37 crore rupees and a profit after tax of about 14 crore rupees. The gap between 875 and 890 crore rupees is the difference between the company's operating revenue and its wider revenue line, which is why both numbers appear in print [14].
The quarter that followed was the one that tested the story. In the first quarter of the next financial year the company reported revenue of about 345 crore rupees, a marginal profit at the operating level of about 2 crore rupees and a net loss of about 6 crore rupees. Taku's reading of the numbers has been consistent: the business lines are contribution positive, the losses come from fixed costs, and the fall in those costs as a share of revenue is what will produce sustainable profit rather than a single good quarter [14].
The company had turned profitable at the operating level a year earlier, closing the year to March 2023 with net revenue of about 560 crore rupees, up 39 per cent, after a profitable March quarter, and Taku said at the time that she expected revenue to almost double to over 1,000 crore rupees in the following year with full year profitability [7].
ADIA, the unicorn round and the founders' stake
The valuation of the company was settled by two transactions in 2021. In June the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority bought a 2.7 per cent slice for about 20 million dollars, which put a value of over 700 million dollars on the business. In October the company was described as a unicorn after a secondary sale of employee stock led by a former Blackstone India chief, which valued it at a billion dollars [8][9].
The same coverage put a number on the founders' holding for the first time: Bipin Preet Singh and Upasana Taku together owned about 33.2 per cent of the company before the public issue, with the Abu Dhabi fund's 2.7 per cent sitting alongside. That combined stake is the main source of the couple's wealth on paper, and it also means that about two thirds of the company is held by investors that include Sequoia Capital India, now Peak XV Partners, American Express, Cisco, Bajaj Finance and the Abu Dhabi sovereign fund [9].
An employee stock option pool was one of the points the company and its advisers had to explain in the offer documents. Taku said publicly that the number of shares that would arise from the full exercise of the options granted came to about 7 per cent of the fully diluted shares, a figure that mattered to investors because it dilutes everyone else in the table [9].
That stake is the reason this page will not print a net worth figure for her. The founders' holding is disclosed as a pair rather than individually, the company has published no breakdown of the split, and the value of the holding moves with the listed share price, which has been volatile since the issue [1][14].
The first IPO attempt and the two year freeze
MobiKwik filed its first draft papers in July 2021, for a 1,900 crore rupee public issue, and had the approval of the market regulator by October of that year. The listing was expected in the financial year that followed, and the company described itself in the filings as a payments business moving into credit and financial distribution [10].
Then the market changed. November 2021 brought a poor debut for the largest new age listing of the season, and Taku and Bipin Preet Singh decided to wait rather than price the issue into a falling market. Business Today reported the decision with the chief executive's own explanation, that the company would delay the listing rather than accept a weak valuation [11].
The waiting turned out to be long. The company's revenue and profit numbers improved through the next two years, but public market sentiment towards consumer app companies in India stayed poor, and the issue stayed on the shelf. During that period the company had to keep answering the two questions that had dogged it: whether payments in India can ever make money on their own, and whether a company that had spent a decade as the number two or three in its category could justify a listing [10][11].
The second attempt and a smaller issue
The company came back to the regulator in January 2024 with fresh draft papers for a much smaller issue of about 700 crore rupees, cut from the 1,900 crore rupees it had asked for in 2021. The smaller ask was a response to the market rather than a sign of the business being smaller, and the papers carried the company's new shape: a profitable year, a lending book, and a payments business with a very large user base and modest revenue per user [12].
The market regulator approved the trimmed issue in November 2024, and the company went to the public within weeks, with the price band set at 265 to 279 rupees a share. It raised about 257 crore rupees from anchor investors just before the issue opened, across 21 investors, of whom 10 were domestic funds contributing about 137 crore rupees [13].
The offer was a fresh issue of about 572 crore rupees, with no sale of shares by any existing investor, which is an unusual structure and a detail Taku pointed out herself. Her own explanation was that neither she nor her husband nor any of the company's institutional shareholders were selling, and that the money was going into the business [14].
The listing in December 2024
The issue opened in the second week of December 2024 and demand was much stronger than the company had been told to expect. By the end of the second day the offer was subscribed about 17 times, with the retail portion subscribed 58 times and the non institutional portion 22 times, while institutional buyers had yet to fill their quota. Of the 11 million shares open to the public, bids were received for 226 million [15].
The company listed on 18 December 2024, which made it the first payments company of its generation to reach the exchanges and the second attempt in three years to have succeeded. Taku and her husband appeared in the company's own interview around the listing with their titles stated plainly, she as chairperson and chief financial officer and he as managing director and chief executive [14][15].
Her own summary of the milestone was about the length of the road rather than the day itself. She said there is no such thing as overnight success, that the company had started from a living room in Dwarka and that a founder has to take no for an answer several times, be rejected repeatedly and keep going anyway. She also made a point of thanking the employees who had stayed through the years when the company could not pay as well as its rivals [3].
The listing changed the company's constraints more than its strategy. A listed company has to report quarterly, defend its numbers in public and answer shareholders, which for a business that had spent a decade being privately patient about profits was a real tightening. It also gave the company a currency, its own shares, for acquisitions and for employee compensation [14].
Products after the listing: Pocket UPI, Lens.ai and Xtra
MobiKwik runs three lines of business, and Taku describes them as consumer payments, financial product distribution and a payment gateway. The payments side carries the users, the distribution side carries the margins, and the gateway serves merchants. That structure is what the company argues justifies a public listing for a wallet business in a market where the largest payments platforms have struggled to make money on payments alone [14].
The product that gets the most attention is Pocket UPI, a way of paying by QR code out of a wallet balance rather than a bank account, which the company positions as a bridge for users who are not comfortable with bank linked payments. The company has also invested in a tool it calls Lens.ai, which analyses bank statements for lending decisions, and in the lending partnerships that make up its credit business [1][14].
The most contentious product has been the peer to peer lending platform Xtra, launched in partnership with the lender Lendbox. In September 2024 the company suspended instant withdrawals on the platform after new central bank directions on peer to peer lending, and users complained that their money had been reinvested in new borrowers without their consent. MobiKwik said the change came from its lending partner rather than from the company, and that users would not be able to withdraw on the old terms. Competitors had to do the same thing in the same months [1].
The company's own numbers at the end of 2024 were about 160 million registered users and about 4 million merchants, which it described in its interviews as the largest user base of any digital wallet in India. Revenue per user, the number its critics return to, remains far below the levels of the larger platforms [1][14].
Net worth and wealth
There is no verified figure for Upasana Taku's personal wealth. MobiKwik's offer documents disclosed the founders' holding as a combined 33.2 per cent rather than a personal stake, the company has published no breakdown of how that is split between the two of them, and the value of the holding changes with the company's listed share price [1][9].
What can be stated is the structure of the wealth. She is a promoter of a listed company, she holds a salary and a chairperson's position at MobiKwik and she has been an investor in her own right through the company's earlier rounds. Any rupee figure attached to her name online is an estimate built by multiplying an assumed personal stake by the share price of the day, and those estimates have moved by a large margin since the listing [1][14].
Husband, children and family
Upasana Taku is married to Bipin Preet Singh, the man she founded MobiKwik with in 2009. The two are described in the company's own history and in the press as the husband and wife who built the business together, and they have worked in the same company for more than fifteen years, which is a longer stretch than most marriages get in a shared office [1].
The details of their family life are not in the public record, and this page does not invent them. Neither has published a wedding date to the general press, neither has spoken publicly about children, and the couple have kept their home life out of the interviews they give about the company. The line the press draws, when the subject comes up, is the one Taku draws herself: that the two of them have spent most of their adult lives on one project [1][3].
What is known about the household is its geography rather than its detail. The company began in a living room in Dwarka in west Delhi, the couple moved with the business as it grew, and MobiKwik is now headquartered in Gurugram, which is where they live and work [1].
Bipin Preet Singh and the split of work
In the division of roles that has run since the beginning, Bipin Preet Singh runs the product and the engineering, deals with the regulators and holds the title of managing director and chief executive, while Taku has run the operating and financial side. She was the company's chief operating officer for most of its life and is its chairperson and, at the time of the listing, its chief financial officer [1][14].
The split matters to how the company is read, because the two founders present the same business from opposite ends. In the company's interviews Singh talks about products, the untapped market of users who are not yet on digital payments and the decision to grow without burning cash, while Taku talks about revenue, contribution margins and fixed costs. Investors get the financial case from one of them and the product case from the other [14].
Singh seeded the company himself, built the first website and took the first office on rent, and it was the two of them together who put their own money in rather than taking an early cheque. Taku's contribution to the arrangement, in her own telling, was the discipline about money that ran through the whole business from the living room years onwards [1][3].
Personal life, work style and the advice she gives
Taku's public remarks about work are practical rather than inspirational, and they usually come back to two things: management as a skill that has to be learned, and the value of a job that teaches you how a company actually runs. In a widely read interview with The Economic Times she said that being a good leader is much more than hitting your targets with a team, and that alongside business skills a person has to acquire people management and coaching skills in order to grow themselves and the people around them [2].
She has also been willing to say what she got wrong. Her account of her first job is that she stayed too long, that HSBC was a good place to learn with a multi ethnic team and a supportive manager, and that she would have learned more if she had moved on earlier. The advice she draws from it is that a person should judge a job on the growth it offers rather than on comfort [2].
The other recurring theme in her interviews is frugality. She describes the company as having been built on a smaller pile of capital than its competitors, and she has framed that constraint as an advantage, because a business that cannot spend its way to growth has to make its products work. It is the argument she makes for the company's numbers, and it is also the personality of the company's chief financial officer [3][14].
House and property
No house, address or property holding of Upasana Taku's is part of the public record. She does not discuss real estate in interviews and the company's filings cover her shareholding rather than her assets. The only statement that can be made honestly is a geographic one: she and her husband live in the region where the company is based, and MobiKwik has been headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana since it moved out of its first rented space in Dwarka, Delhi [1].
Awards and recognition
Upasana Taku's recognition in the public record is tied to the company rather than to a list of personal prizes. There is no national honour, no major industry award and no named fellowship that can be sourced for her, and this page does not invent one [1].
The recognition that does exist is worth recording. In the run up to the first attempt at a listing she was counted among the small group of women founders taking an Indian company to the market, with the founder of the beauty retailer Nykaa named as the other one in the same season, a fact pointed out to her in an interview which she answered as a question about responsibility rather than about pride [3].
The company's own milestones are the other half of the record: MobiKwik was one of the first digital wallets licensed by the Reserve Bank of India, it was one of the first Indian payments companies to be described as a unicorn in the 2021 cycle, and in December 2024 it became a listed company. Each of those is a company fact, and each is also the result of the operating job she has held for fifteen years [1][14].
Her most quoted public appearance in a teaching register is the Economic Times interview about management and coaching, which circulates in Indian business schools as a short account of what a first job and a first leadership role are for [2].
Philanthropy and public positions
MobiKwik has no family foundation attached to it and Upasana Taku has no announced philanthropic vehicle, so there is nothing to list on that front. Her public positions are about the business she runs and about access to financial services [1].
The argument she and Bipin Preet Singh make most often is about who the Indian financial system has not reached. In the company's interviews around the listing, Singh described the target customer as a user in a tier two or tier three city, often on a middle or lower middle income, who has limited access to banking, and described the company's business as distributing credit cards, loans, deposits and mutual funds to that customer at accessible ticket sizes through partnerships with banks and non bank lenders [14].
Taku's own version of the same point is about the size of the opportunity rather than about duty. She has said that the number of digitally paying users in India is still not more than about 180 million, or roughly a tenth of the population, and that this gap is the company's growth plan. It is a commercial argument about inclusion rather than a charitable one, and it is the one the company offers to its shareholders [9].
On her own time, the public record shows speaking appearances at industry events and the interviews described above. There is no evidence of an endowment, a trust or a scholarship in her name, and none is claimed here [1].
Controversies and criticism
The most serious controversy in the company's history is the data breach of 2021. In February of that year a security researcher alleged that a hacker group had taken the know your customer records of nearly 100 million MobiKwik users and put them up for sale on the dark web. The company denied the claim within days and said it would take legal action against the researcher. Independent researchers and users then reported that data matching their own records was appearing online, and by the end of March the company had engaged a third party to run a forensic audit. Nobody has been publicly held responsible and the company has never confirmed the full extent of the leak [16].
The second controversy is operational. In September 2024 the company suspended instant withdrawals on the Xtra peer to peer lending platform after new directions from the central bank, and users complained that their money had been reinvested in fresh borrowers without their consent. MobiKwik's answer was that the withdrawal terms were changed by its lending partner, Lendbox, and that users would not be able to take their money out under the old terms [1].
The third is the long argument about the company's economics. For most of its life MobiKwik grew its user base faster than its revenue and lost money doing it, and its critics have argued that a wallet in India is a commodity product with no pricing power. The company's answer is the one Taku gives with the numbers: that its payments and financial distribution businesses are contribution positive, that fixed costs have fallen from about 47 per cent of revenue to about 30 per cent, and that the profit it reported for the year to March 2024 was the proof rather than the promise [14].
Two smaller episodes are worth noting for completeness. The company's app was briefly removed from the Google Play Store in May 2020 over an advertising policy matter and reinstated within days, and its first attempt at a public issue was pulled in 2021 after a weak debut by another payments company, a decision that cost it two years and was taken deliberately rather than forced on it [11][14].
The questions people search about Upasana Taku
Who is Upasana Taku? An Indian entrepreneur who co-founded MobiKwik in 2009 with her husband Bipin Preet Singh, ran its operations for most of its life and is its chairperson [1].
How old is Upasana Taku? Her date of birth has never been published, so no accurate age can be given. She studied at Stanford and was in banking in the United States before 2009 [1][2].
Who is Upasana Taku's husband? Bipin Preet Singh, her co-founder and the managing director and chief executive of MobiKwik [1].
Does Upasana Taku have children? Nothing about children has been published, and the couple do not discuss their family in public [1].
What is Upasana Taku's net worth? No verified figure exists. The founders together held about 33.2 per cent before the listing and the split between them has not been disclosed [9].
What did Upasana Taku do before MobiKwik? She studied at Stanford, worked at HSBC in California and held banking and payments roles in the United States before returning to India [2][3].
Is Upasana Taku the chief executive of MobiKwik? No. Bipin Preet Singh is managing director and chief executive. She has been chief operating officer and is chairperson and chief financial officer [14].
What is MobiKwik? An Indian payments and financial services company, founded in 2009, with a digital wallet, a payment gateway and a distribution business for loans, insurance and mutual funds [1].
When did MobiKwik list on the stock market? It listed on 18 December 2024 after an issue of about 572 crore rupees at a price band of 265 to 279 rupees a share [15].
How many users does MobiKwik have? About 160 million registered users and about 4 million merchants, according to the figures the company gave around the listing [14].
Has MobiKwik been profitable? It reported a profit of about 14 crore rupees for the year to March 2024, its first full year in the black, after losses in earlier years [6].
How much money has MobiKwik raised? The company says it raised roughly 1,200 crore rupees in total across its private life, which is far less than its larger competitors, before the public issue in 2024 [14].
