Meet Upasana Taku, woman who built Rs 8000 crore firm after leaving a cushy job in the US

Upasana Taku, the co-founder of fintech major MobiKwik, said the company turned profitable in the March quarter of the financial year 2022-23. In the current year, the company is aiming to double the revenue and achieve profitability for the complete year. The last financial year, the platform made Rs 560 crore as revenue. In 2024, the company is aiming for a profit of Rs 50 crore. She further said that the number of active credit users soared from 2 million to 4 million. She said the 'Buy Now Pay Later' scheme helped them achieve favorable results. She also said that MobiKwik will bring an IPO after 2-3 profitable consecutive quarters. The company had last raised funds in December 2021 at a valuation of 700 million dollars (Rs 5,723 crore). However, the valuation rose to over one billion after his employees exercised ESOPs.

Taku is the chairperson of the MobiKwik board. She is also the COO of the company. She founded the company along with her husband. She did her engineering from Punjab Technical University. She later completed a Master's Degree in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. She has over 17 years of experience in allied fields. Before starting the company, she was a product manager at American payments giant, PayPal. She also worked with HSBC. She used to live in the United States but returned to India in 2008, to create an impact at the grassroot levels.

In an old interview with Forbes, she said she wanted to solve a big problem in India, which is a massive country with a lot of untapped potential and issues. She had explored other markets as well but India was a great place for that.

Her family was against the move to come back to India as they considered it a very big risk. She is the daughter of a physics professor father and a musician mother who, at the time, were residing in Africa - her father was teaching at the University of Asmara in Eritrea. They returned in 2009.

She was on the fast track at PayPal but left everything in pursuit of her entrepreneurial dream. She had all the luxuries of life such as a big house, a car and a motorcycle. Coming back to India was a risk. She came back and worked for a rural microfinance NGO Drishtee in rural areas in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh while she figured out her next steps in life.

She met her husband Bipin Preet Singh at a play, in 2008. He told the magazine that she hadn't returned to India to lead an easy life. She wanted to make an impact. They got married in 2011.

Singh, MobiKwik co-founder, was thinking about the platform in 2008. He wasn't happy with his job. He used to tell her that he couldn't quit his job because he had to support his family.

Singh told the magazine that once, Upasana and he had a heated conversation where she asked him to pursue one direction that made him happy and stop everything else.

He had told Forbes that she bluntly asked him -- “If you aren’t going to do this now, when do you think you’ll be able to do it?”

She gave him the confidence to quit his job and launch the startup formally. He launched the company in 2009. She also joined him.

Taku faced gender bias as an entrepreneur.  She said she met financiers who would tell her during a pitch that they were looking for a male founder. She would tell them that her male counterparts may not answer their questions as well as she would. She would never work with such people.