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Lizzie Chapman, Priya Sharma, and Ashish Anantharaman, the co-founders of ZestMoney, have officially resigned from the company.

The development comes two months after the much-talked-about acquisition of the buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) platform by PhonePe fell through. 

“Over the last few weeks, we have done a lot of thinking and whilst it has been very hard for us to arrive at this conclusion, we have decided that we will step away from our Operating roles as CEO (Lizzie), CFO & COO (Priya) and CTO (Ashish),” the management informed the team over an email seen by i. 

The trio will continue to be significant shareholders in the company. 

“To reiterate; we are also immensely proud of the incredible team and the unique culture we built at ZestMoney – which was only underlined to us in recent weeks as we saw how everyone of us came together to support each other during one of the hardest times a startup can go through,” Chapman added. 

Walmart-backed fintech decacorn PhonePe had been in talks to acquire Zestmoney for $200 million-$300 million since November 2022. However, in March, it walked away from the deal citing issues with due diligence, leaving ZestMoney high and dry. The deal would have strengthened the digital payments major’s foothold in the lending space.

“Priya, Ashish and myself started ZestMoney almost 8 years ago with a dream of making life affordable for millions of Indians…we are proud of how far we went on that journey and the advances we made in truly democratising credit in the country using our path-breaking technology,” the email read.  

The co-founder continues, “We have 100% belief and faith in the potential that ZestMoney has and the new management team who will step up at this time and we will do absolutely everything we can to support them and you, both over the next 4 months as we transition, and over the longer term.” 

On reports of PhonePe taking over ZestMoney’s assets and onboarding its employees, its Co-founder and CEO Sameer Nigam clarified it did not take over the latter’s assets.

“We bought a copy of their LSP tech IP & separately hired ~130 ZM employees. The Tech IP *copy* was purchase with the company’s founders, board and investors’ consent. The employees were hired with ZM’s consent since they had to downsize,” Nigam wrote in reply to a Twitter post.