Thread by @stockifi_Invest

Mega Thread on the complete journey of How @MobiKwik, India's Largest Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) Fintech company was established by @BipinSingh and @UpasanaTaku

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1) In 2009, Bipin Singh decided to quit his mundane corporate job and founded MobiKwik along with Upasana Taku.

2) He earned an electrical engineering degree from IIT Delhi in 2002.

3) After graduating, he worked for Intel, NVIDIA, and Freescale Semiconductors for seven years.

4) He began his work with Intel as a Senior Design Engineer. During his three-year tenure, he oversaw the Whitefield project, also known as Intel's first server microprocessor design.

5) Bipin took an unusual career step in 2006 when he joined Janaagraha as a Training Facilitator.

6) There he worked on India's first citizen awareness program, with the goal of motivating students in their youth to participate in the political process in ways other than voting.

7) Upasana Taku comes from a solid payment background as a senior product manager with PayPal (an eBay company) in Silicon Valley and HSBC in San Diego.

8) She earned a Bachelor of Engineering from NIT Jalandhar and a Master of Management Science from Stanford University.

9) Being considered a startup enabler, which aimed to simplify online payments in India, she seemed to be a perfect match for MobiKwik and got on board as a director and partner in February 2010.

10) Her primary emphasis at MobiKwik Wallet was bringing the platform to millions of retailers, forming bank partnerships, and acquiring talent.

11) She recognized that slow-moving or failed payments were a significant issue for the entire E-commerce business.

12) Because recharging is a tiny price transaction, they designed a digital wallet where consumers could retain their money and recharge whenever they wanted.

13) Now that he had it all — the business abilities, the technological skills, and the usability – he put up initial funding of roughly Rs. 8 lakhs from his pocket to kickstart the project.

14) While the concept of MobiKwik sounded terrific, putting it into action proved difficult. Initially, no bank was willing to provide them with a platform.

15) They pooled their savings of Rs. 25 lakhs, hired two employees, began creating a more complex and superior payment gateway, and created Zaakpay com in September 2010.

16) They used to work on the idea at Upasana's flat initially, which took around five months to complete.

And by February 2011, they had released their prototype – Bank pay – and launched their first pilot in May 2011.

17) Taku and Singh established their Mobikwik office in Dwarka in a home-office setting, where the team would bond over home-cooked meals.

18) Even on the couple's wedding day, both were working from the venue itself, taking breaks to complete their tasks quickly.

19) Struggling with money, the couple got their first office by 2013 and then swooped in a whopping investment of $ 2.5 million.

20) The RBI approved the company's usage of the MobiKwik wallet in 2013, and in May 2018, it began offering modest loans to customers as part of its business.

21) MobiKwik began as a website with a password-protected wallet, but it has since expanded to include mobile apps.

22) The company first collaborated with online retailers to make its wallets available as a payment option on e-commerce sites.

23) When presented with the option of spending his savings on an expensive B-school degree from a top US university or investing in his startup at the age of 29, Bipin chose the latter.

24) It was a decision that required him to make a difficult transition from hardware to software, and bootstrap his way to success.

25)In 2012, they started a digital wallet system that allowed users to deposit money online for bill payments, shopping, travel bookings, etc.

26) Today, MobiKwik offers to Buy Now Pay Later products through MobiKwik Zip, loans, accident, life, fire insurance, IMPS money transfer, credit card bill payment, mutual funds, and DTH recharge.

27) In July 2015, the firm announced a partnership with Uber, allowing Uber and its drivers to accept debit and credit card payments through MobiKwik.

28) They began offering instant microloans between Rs. 500 & 2,500 to customers in 2016 through a partnership with CashCare.

29)In November 2016, the business released the MobiKwik Lite mobile app, aimed at users of older 2G mobile networks and individuals who live in places with limited internet access. They had more than 1.5 million merchants and 55 million users in the same month.

30) Following the demonetization in November 2016, MobiKwik saw a 400% surge in financial transactions using the service by December 2016.

31) In Feb 2017, the company announced plans to invest $ 45 million to increase its user base from 50 million to 150 million in 2017.

32) Paytm and Mobikwik accounted for 80 percent of India's mobile wallet transactions in June 2017.

33)MobiKwik announced a new agreement with DT One in 2019 to expand its worldwide operations. The company also started selling loans, insurance, and investment advice in 2019.

34) MobiKwik is currently the largest BNPL Fintech company in India with 4 million+ BNPL transactions annually.

35) The company is witnessing an exponential growth of 14x from a year ago.

36)They have 41.6 million KYC-completed users acquired through the MobiKwik Wallet. As a result, the CAC for their BNPL segment is effectively zero.

37) Bipin has been named one of India's top tech entrepreneurs and Fortune's '40 under 40' list of Indian entrepreneurs.

38) He believes that the Indian Fintech market will be worth at least $1 trillion by 2025, with MobiKwik playing a pivotal role.

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