Sameer Nigam

Some Lesser Known Facts About Sameer Nigam

• He spent his early life living in Delhi and Noida.

• He moved to Hiranandani Gardens, Bombay (now Mumbai), during his teenage in the 1990s and completed his college education. ^[2]Youtube – CNBC TV18

• From 2007 to 2009, he was enrolled at the USA’s Wharton Business School University of Pennsylvania and studied MBA.

• He holds a postgraduate degree in Computer Science from the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA.

• His father graduated from the prestigious IIT and began his career in the Indian Navy. Later, he joined Larsen & Toubro.

• He has also been a part of major projects such as INS Arihant and Chandrayan.

• His mother was one of the earliest employees to work with TCS (Tata Consultancy Services Limited) in the early 1970’s.

• She has a PhD and learned computer science by herself.

• In the early 1980s, she became a serial entrepreneur, and by the mid-1980s, she had established her first firm.

• She passed the IAS exam on her first attempt when she was in her 40s.

• Sameer’s sister is a Math Professor in Canada.

• His wife, a strategy consultant, belongs to Bandra, Mumbai.

• Together, they have a daughter and a son.

• Sameer developed Shopzilla Inc.’s proprietary shopping search engine and served as the Product Management Director.

• He founded Mime360 in 2009 which was a music-streaming digital media distribution startup based out of Mumbai. The startup was useful in connecting content owners and content publishers.

• Sameer Nigam started working in Flipkart when his startup, Mime360 was acqi-hired by Flipkart in 2011. He held the positions of Senior Vice President of Engineering and Vice President of Marketing at Flipkart.

• Sameer is the CEO of PhonePe, a money transaction app. He founded the app in 2015 along with his friends Rahul Chari and Burzin Engineer.

• Flipkart acquired PhonePe and used it as the official wallet app.

• Flipkart and PhonePe were separated on 23 December 2022.

• Sameer Nigam talked about PhonePe’s separation from Flipkart on 23 December 2022 in a press release and said,

  Flipkart and PhonePe are proud, homegrown Indian brands with a user base upwards of 400 million each. We are looking forward to the next phase of our growth as we invest in new businesses – like insurance, wealth management and lending, while also enabling the next wave of growth for UPI payments in India. This will help propel our vision to provide billions of Indians with financial inclusion.”

• PhonePe, a successful decacorn (over $10 billion valuation), is a leading company in UPI-based money transactions in India with over 50 crore registered users in 2023.

• Over the years, PhonePe has won multiple awards including Outstanding Merchant UPI Player’ by the NPCI in 2018.

• PhonePe was honoured at the IndIAA Awards with the Best campaign under the Telecom & Technology category in 2018.

• PhonePe won the 9th India Digital Awards at the IAMAI in 2019.

• PhonePe was honoured at the 8th Annual Indian Retail & eRetail Awards with the Best Digital Wallet Initiative Award in 2019.

• PhonePe was honoured at the ET BFSI Innovation Tribe Virtual Summit & Awards with the Excellence in WealthTech award in 2020.

• PhonePe was honoured at the IAMAI India Digital Awards as its Mutual Funds product won a Gold and a Silver award for Excellence in Wealth Management and for the Unstoppable India campaign in the Online Video category respectively in 2021.

• PhonePe was honoured at the ASSOCHAM Annual FinTech Digital Payments Awards and won the Excellence in InsurTech Award in the same year.

• PhonePe was honoured at the BW Festival of FinTech Awards with the Fintech of the Year Award in 2022.

• PhonePe was awarded with the Best Product/Service Innovation (Jury’s Choice) for the ‘End-to-end digital journey for Motor insurance’ initiative 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) in 2023.

  

• PhonePe also provides financial services such as insurance, loans, investments, etc.

• In an interview, Sameer Nigam discussed how he and his team multitasked in different roles and how they were affected after being acqui-hired by Flipkart. He said,
  

  “I think everyone becomes a much more seasoned entrepreneur [because] you’re basically playing every function…you’re a lawyer and a marketer, a copywriter, and a coder. So it helped a lot of us. I think why it worked well was if you see that team, one level below Sachin and Binny, a lot of the folks had a strong tech background or business background, or both.”

• PhonePe headquarters moved to India from Singapore in 2022 for which the giant had to pay a whopping tax of Rs 8000 crore.
• He has been friends with Rahul Chari, PhonePe co-founder for over 20 years. He talked about their friendship in an interview and said,
  

  So I was just saying that I think given how long we’d known each other Chari and I went to undergrad in Bombay so we’ve known each other since 1995, so it’s 26 years now. His wife was a junior of ours in college, I mean literally the families have known each other, we were roommates in Arizona and so I think that one was just very, very easy.

  

• Sameer Nigam is a volleyball enthusiast and owns a RuPay Prime Volleyball League team, Mumbai Meteors.
• He talked in an interview about how the league can take the sport to new heights, and said,
  

  As a regular volleyball player myself, I have a great sense of how enthralling the sport can be. And the PVL gives us a perfect opportunity to build this sport in a professional way to a world-beating level.”