Co-founder, Executive Director and CFO, MobiKwik | Founded 2009 | Gurugram
Early in MobiKwik’s life, Upasana Taku sat across from a tax official who had a question for her. “Don’t you have any male director in your company?” he asked, as Outlook Business later reported.
Her husband and co-founder, Bipin Preet Singh, was right there beside her. She did not wait for him to speak. She told the official that she handled the company’s financial matters herself, and that she was well qualified to understand them.
Fifteen years after MobiKwik started, that same woman led the company to the stock market. This is the story of the long road in between.
A professor’s daughter with many hometowns
Upasana was born in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Her family has Kashmiri roots, she finished school in Surat, and she went to college in Punjab, a mix of places that YourStory credited with shaping her resilience. Her father was a physics professor and her mother a music teacher, Business Today reported in 2021.
She studied industrial engineering at the Regional Engineering College in Jalandhar, the institution that is now NIT Jalandhar. Then she set her sights on Stanford.
Talking her way into Stanford
Stanford admitted her to its master’s programme in management science and engineering, but without a scholarship. According to Business Today, she spent about a month going from lab to lab, presenting herself and asking for work, until she won a research assistantship that paid for her studies.
After Stanford she joined HSBC in San Diego, working on marketing, forecasting and market research. She then moved to PayPal as a product manager. There she worked on payment systems, risk and fraud management, and user experience. These were the years when PayPal was showing the world what online payments could look like.
“Work was becoming too easy”
By 2008, she wanted something different. “Work was becoming too easy,” she told YourStory. She wanted to work on problems on the ground in India.
She came back to India and joined a non-profit in Delhi, work that took her to villages in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. She also spent a short time at a social media start-up. It was in this period that she met the man she would build a company with.
A play, a phone call and a payments company
The meeting itself was an accident. In October 2008, Bipin Preet Singh, an IIT Delhi engineer who had worked at Intel, NVIDIA and Freescale Semiconductor, was waiting outside a play. A friend asked him to give someone directions over the phone. That someone was Upasana, who was running late, and he waited outside with her ticket, Quartz reported.
Bipin wanted to build a mobile start-up. Upasana wanted to work in payments. “We got introduced through a common friend and we clicked as a team,” she told Business India.
In 2009, Bipin quit his job to start MobiKwik. According to Bipin’s account to Quartz, it was Upasana who pushed him to take the leap. “Upasana told me that this is the time when you either do it, or you don’t,” he said. She joined him full-time a few months after the launch.
MobiKwik began as a site for mobile recharges and later grew into a mobile wallet. In 2010, Upasana launched Zaakpay, a payment gateway for online merchants. The couple married in 2011, about two years after starting up. That same year they moved the company out of their home into a five-bedroom apartment in Dwarka, Delhi.
Money was tight. “We were still self-funded because we did not have that much spending,” she told Quartz, adding that salaries were “in the range of Rs20,000-30,000.” Partners were slow to come on board. “It took us nine months to complete the first deal,” she told Outlook Business.
The couple divided the work clearly. Bipin looked after engineering, consumer growth and marketing. Upasana took business partnerships, products and finance.
“Don’t you have any male director?”
Finance was her territory, which is why the tax official’s question stung. It was not the only one of its kind. Outlook Business reported that investors once asked her whether she planned to become a mother anytime soon. “I told them it was none of their business and never spoke to the investors again,” she said.
YourStory reported that, in the early years, some auditors, investors and bankers asked to deal with a male colleague instead of her. Years later, preparing for MobiKwik’s IPO, she was still often the only woman in the room. “I have been in several meetings, in-person and digital, where there were like 20-30 people and I’m the sole woman,” she told Business Today in 2021.
Wallets, demonetisation and a stalled IPO
MobiKwik stayed bootstrapped for more than four years. In 2013–14, it received a prepaid wallet licence from the Reserve Bank of India and raised its Series A from Sequoia Capital, Business India reported. Sequoia was joined by Tree Line Asia, Cisco and American Express in a round of about $25 million in 2015, and by Japan’s GMO Internet and others in a $50 million round in 2016.
In November 2016, the government’s demonetisation pushed millions of Indians towards digital payments, and MobiKwik’s traffic surged. In 2017, Bajaj Finance bought a stake of about 12% in the company. Over the following years MobiKwik added credit products, including buy-now-pay-later, alongside its wallet and the Zaakpay gateway.
In 2021, the pace quickened. In June, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority invested $20 million. In July, MobiKwik filed draft papers with SEBI to raise ₹1,900 crore through an IPO, and Upasana led the listing effort. In October, a secondary share sale valued the company at over $1 billion, making MobiKwik a unicorn.
There were hard moments too. In early 2021, a security researcher alleged that data of millions of MobiKwik users had leaked onto the dark web. The company denied that the data came from its systems, and the RBI directed it to commission a forensic audit, Business Today reported.
Then, in November 2021, Paytm’s weak stock market debut cooled investor appetite for fintech listings. MobiKwik deferred its IPO, saying it would list at “the right time”, Business Standard reported.
The listing, at last
The company spent the next two years working towards profit. In FY24, MobiKwik reported its first annual profit, ₹14.1 crore, on revenue of ₹875 crore, according to Inc42. In January 2024, it refiled its draft papers, this time for ₹700 crore, and later trimmed the issue to ₹572 crore.
“This change in issue size is not a reduction in expectations but a strategic response to our strong financial growth,” Upasana told BW Businessworld in November 2024. “Despite raising the least capital compared to our competitors, we have seen consistent growth.”
The IPO opened on 11 December 2024 at ₹279 a share and was subscribed more than 119 times. On 18 December 2024, MobiKwik listed on the NSE at ₹440, nearly 58% above the issue price, and closed the day at ₹530.30 on the BSE, YourStory reported. Fifteen years after it began as a mobile recharge site, the couple’s company was public.
Where she stands now
In December 2025, MobiKwik named former diplomat Navdeep Singh Suri as chairperson of its board, succeeding Upasana, who continues as Executive Director, CFO and co-founder, according to the company’s filing with the stock exchange.
Life as a listed company has not been smooth. In FY26, MobiKwik’s revenue fell 4.4% to ₹1,119.2 crore, and it posted a net loss of ₹61.9 crore, roughly half the previous year’s loss, Inc42 reported in May 2026. During the year it also took a hit of about ₹40 crore from fraud on its platform, which it blamed on a glitch exploited by bad actors. But it returned to quarterly profit in the second half of FY26, and posted a net profit of ₹7.6 crore in the April–June 2026 quarter. By March 2026, it had 189.6 million registered users and 4.92 million merchants.
In September 2026, Upasana bought more MobiKwik shares from the open market, taking her stake to 10.24%, Business Today reported.
When MobiKwik launched in 2009, fewer than 10 million Indians transacted digitally, she once pointed out. By 2021, she said, about 300 million did. The engineer who once had to tell a tax official that she ran the company’s finances is still running them, now for a listed company.
Founder Journeys is a Sakhi Sangini series telling the stories of women who built businesses in India. This story is based on public interviews and reporting.
Sources: Outlook Business (October 2016); YourStory (October 2016, December 2024); Quartz (2019); Business India (October 2021); Business Today (April 2021, December 2021, October 2026); Inc42 (July 2021, October 2021, August 2024, May 2026); Business Standard (November 2021, January 2024); YourStory (April 2015); Business Insider (May 2016); BW Businessworld (November 2024); Entrackr (December 2024); Outlook Business (November 2025); One MobiKwik Systems NSE filing (December 2025).
