After all the three co-founders of troubled fintech startup stepped down, the Goldman Sachs-backed platform has set in place a new leadership team to take charge.
Abhishek Sharma, Head of Growth; Mandar Satupte, Chief Banking Officer; and Mohit Chhajer, Vice President of Finance and Financial Operations (FinOps)–all internal appointments–will assume responsibility for leading ZestMoney.
“As we go on to the next chapters of our own journeys, we are confidently passing the baton to Mohit Chhajer, Mandar Satpute, and Abhishek Sharma to lead the company into the future,” former Co-founder Lizzie Chapman wrote in a LinkedIn post.
“They have all been with us on the journey for a long time, having helped build and scale the company to be the largest digital lending franchise in the country. We have 100% belief in ZestMoney’s potential and the 175 incredible “Zesties” who are more than ready to take on the huge opportunity that lies ahead for the company,” she wrote.
On May 15, the Co-founders—Lizzie Chapman, Priya Sharma, and Ashish Anantharaman—announced their resignations to 175 employees, during a company townhall.
“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.
The trio will continue to be significant shareholders in the company.
The development comes two months after the much-talked-about acquisition deal of the BNPL platform with PhonePe fell through.
The Walmart-backed fintech decacorn was in talks to acquire ZestMoney for $200-$300 million since November 2022. However, in March, it walked away from the deal citing issues with due diligence.
In fact, PhonePe had given a loan of about $18 million last year to the firm, which acted as a ‘lifeline’ for the company.
On reports of PhonePe taking over ZestMoney’s assets and onboarding its employees, its Co-founder and CEO Sameer Nigam clarified the company 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.
PhonePe has also absorbed some of ZestMoney’s employees.
