Sameer Nigam is an Indian entrepreneur and co-founder of PhonePe, a digital platform for instant payments and financial services. He is also the CEO of PhonePe.
Contents
Wiki/Biography
Sameer Nigam was born in 1978 (age 46 years; as of 2024) in Bombay (now Mumbai), India. He spent his pre-teen years in Delhi and Noida. In the 1990s, he moved to Hiranandani Gardens, Bombay (now Mumbai), where he completed his college education. He studied MBA from Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania, USA from 2007 to 2009. He is a Post Graduate in Computer Science from the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA.
Physical Appearance
Height (Approx): 5′ 8″
Hair Color: Salt and Pepper (semi-bald)
Eye colour: black
Family
parents and siblings
Sameer Nigam’s father is an IIT graduate and served in the Indian Navy early in his career. After serving in the Navy he joined Larsen & Toubro. He has worked on various projects including INS Arihant and Chandrayaan. His mother worked at TCS (Tata Consultancy Services Limited) in the early 1970s as one of the early employees of the organization. He taught himself computer science and has a PhD. Later in her life, she became a serial entrepreneur in the early 1980s. Sameer talked about his mother’s entrepreneurship in an interview and said that she had established her first firm in the mid-1980s. She also told how when she was 40, she passed the IAS exam in her very first attempt. Sameer has a sister, who is a mathematics professor in Canada.
wife and children
Sameer Nigam’s wife is a resident of Bandra, Mumbai. He is a strategy consultant. Sameer Nigam has a daughter and a son.
livelihood
Samir created the proprietary shopping search engine for Shopzilla Inc., where he served as Director of Product Management. In 2009, he founded Mime360, a startup based in Mumbai. Mime360 is a digital media distribution platform that can stream music and help content owners contact content publishers. The startup was acquired by Flipkart in 2011 and Sameer Nigam started working at Flipkart. He became Senior Vice President of Engineering and Vice President of Marketing at Flipkart. In 2015, Sameer founded PhonePe with his friends, Rahul Chari and Burjin Engineer. In 2016, PhonePe was acquired by Flipkart and became its wallet app. On December 23, 2022, Flipkart completely separated itself from Phonepe. In the press release given by PhonePe, Sameer Nigam talked about this and said,
Flipkart and PhonePe are proud, homegrown Indian brands with a user base of over 400 million. We look forward to the next phase of our growth as we invest in new businesses such as insurance, wealth management and lending, while also enabling the next wave of growth for UPI payments in India. This will help advance our vision of providing financial inclusion to billions of Indians.”
PhonePe is a successful decacorn (a company with over $10 billion valuation) and one of the leading UPI-based money transaction companies in India with over 50 crore registered users by 2023. PhonePe also offers various financial services including insurance, investments, loans. etc.
Awards and Honors
- Sameer Nigam was awarded the Wharton Venture Award in 2009.
- In 2018, he was listed in the Economic Times 40 under India Inc. Forty list of top business leaders.
- In 2021, Sameer won the Hall of Fame Award as IDMA Person of the Year.
- In 2022, he received the Marketer of the Year – UPI Award at the IAA Leadership Awards.
His venture, PhonePe, has won several awards including:-
- In 2018, PhonePe was awarded the ‘Outstanding Merchant UPI Player’ by NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India).
- In 2018, PhonePe won the Best Campaign under the Telecom and Technology category at the IndIAA Awards.
- In 2019, PhonePe won IAMAI’s 9th India Digital Awards.
- In 2019, PhonePe won the Best Digital Wallet Initiative award at the 8th Annual Indian Retail and eRetail Awards.
- In 2020, PhonePe won the Excellence in WealthTech Award at the ET BFSI Innovation Tribe Virtual Summit & Awards.
- In 2021, PhonePe’s mutual fund product won the Gold Award for Excellence in Wealth Management in the Online Video category at the IAMAI India Digital Awards and the Silver Award for the Unstoppable India campaign.
- In the same year, PhonePe won the Excellence in InsurTech Award at the ASSOCHAM Annual Fintech Digital Payment Awards.
- In 2022, PhonePe won the Fintech of the Year award at the BW Festival of Fintech Awards.
- In 2023, PhonePe won the Best Product/Service Innovation (Jury’s Choice) award for its initiative ‘End-to-End Digital Journey for Motor Insurance’ at the ET BFSI Excellence Awards.
- In 2023, PhonePe won the Young Turk of the Year award at CNBC-TV18’s India Business Leader Awards (IBLA).9t
Sameer Nigam receives Young Turk Award for PhonePe
Salary
He was earning Rs. 17.7 crore as reported in 2017.
Facts/General Knowledge
- Sameer Nigam in an interview talked about multitasking in different roles with other employees and how it affected them after the acquisition by Flipkart and said,
I think everyone becomes a more experienced entrepreneur [because] You’re basically playing every role… you’re a lawyer and a marketer, a copywriter and a coder. So this helped many of us. I think why it worked well was that, if you look at the team that was a level below Sachin and Binny, a lot of people had strong technical backgrounds or business backgrounds, or both.
- In 2022, PhonePe shifted its headquarters from Singapore to India. PhonePe had to pay tax of Rs 8,000 crore for this move.
- In an interview, he talked about knowing his friend and PhonePe co-founder, Rahul Chari for over 20 years and said,
So I was just saying how long I think we’ve known each other, Chari and I went to Bombay for graduation, so we’ve known each other since 1995, so now It’s been 26 years. His wife was our junior in college, I mean literally the families knew each other, we were roommates in Arizona and so I think it was very, very easy.
Sameer Nigam (right) with Rahul Chari (left)
- Sameer Nigam is the owner of Mumbai Meteors, a volleyball team that plays in the RuPay Prime Volleyball League. In an interview, he talked about his love for volleyball and the scope of the league to take the game to a higher level and said,
As a regular volleyball player, I have a good understanding of how exciting this game can be. And the PVL gives us an ideal opportunity to build the game professionally to a world-beating level.
Smear Nigam (right) supporting his team Mumbai Meteors
Categories: Biography
Source: vcmp.edu.vn