Sameer Nigam

Co-Founder, Whole-time Director & Chief Executive Officer PhonePe

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Sameer Nigam co-founded PhonePe in December 2015 and has run it ever since, which makes him one of the few people to have led a company from incorporation through to the position of dominant infrastructure in a national payments system. PhonePe is India’s largest UPI application, serving around 600 million users on rails built and mandated by the state — a structural fact that defines the business, because UPI transactions carry effectively no merchant discount rate, so the payments volume itself generates almost no revenue. Everything PhonePe earns, some Rs 7,115 crore in 2025, has to be built on top of that traffic rather than extracted from it. Nigam’s career before PhonePe was in product and engineering rather than in finance: Shopzilla’s shopping search engine, then his own digital media startup Mime360, then senior engineering and marketing leadership at Flipkart, which acquired first Mime360 and later PhonePe itself.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded PhonePe in December 2015 with Rahul Chari and Burzin Engineer, and has been chief executive throughout.
• Built India’s largest UPI payments application, with roughly 600 million users.
• Revenue of approximately Rs 7,115 crore, around $740 million, in 2025.
• Founded Mime360, a digital media distribution platform acquired by Flipkart in 2011.
• Served as Flipkart’s senior vice president of engineering and vice president of marketing.
• Built Shopzilla’s proprietary shopping search engine as director of product management.
• Won the Wharton Venture Award in 2009.
• Completed PhonePe’s separation from Flipkart and its redomiciling from Singapore to India in 2022.
• Converted the company to PhonePe Limited in April 2025 and pre-filed confidentially with SEBI in September 2025 ahead of a domestic listing.

Professional Journey

Nigam’s training is technical and commercial in roughly equal measure — a master’s in computer science from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Wharton, where he won the Venture Award in 2009. His first substantial operating role was at Shopzilla in the United States, as director of product management, where he built the company’s proprietary shopping search engine. That is a consumer-scale search and ranking problem, and it is the right background for what he did next twice over: PhonePe and Flipkart are both, underneath, discovery-and-transaction systems rather than financial ones.

He went out on his own with Mime360, a digital media distribution platform, and in 2011 Flipkart acquired it. This is the hinge of his career. The acquisition took him inside what was then India’s fastest-growing internet company, and rather than a token post-acquisition role he moved into senior operating leadership, serving as Flipkart’s vice president of marketing and its senior vice president of engineering. Holding both functions in sequence at one company is unusual and tells you something about how he is used: he is deployed against whichever part of the machine is the constraint.

In December 2015 he left to start PhonePe with Rahul Chari as chief technology officer and Burzin Engineer as chief reliability officer. The timing was deliberate and, in hindsight, close to perfect. India’s Unified Payments Interface was about to launch as a public payments rail, and the founders bet on building a consumer application on top of national infrastructure rather than on proprietary wallet rails — a bet against the prevailing wallet model of the time. Four months later, in April 2016, Flipkart acquired PhonePe, bringing Nigam back under his former employer’s roof with capital and distribution behind him; the FxMart licence transferred across and was rebranded as the PhonePe wallet. The app itself launched on UPI in August 2016, months after demonetisation would shortly transform Indian payments behaviour.

What followed was a decade of accumulating scale on a rail that pays nothing for volume. UPI carries no merchant discount rate on person-to-merchant transactions of the ordinary sort, which means that PhonePe’s roughly 600 million users generate enormous transaction volume and almost no direct transaction revenue. The strategic problem Nigam has had to solve is therefore monetisation adjacent to payments rather than through them — insurance, lending distribution, wealth products, merchant services and advertising — while continuing to fund the infrastructure that carries the traffic. Revenue reaching around Rs 7,115 crore in 2025 is the measure of how far that has gone.

The corporate structure had to be rebuilt to match. In December 2020 Flipkart and PhonePe announced a partial split, with Walmart retaining majority ownership of both but the two companies operating independently; by 2022 the separation was complete and PhonePe had shifted its domicile from Singapore to India — a deliberate, expensive move made in order to list domestically rather than offshore. Preparation for that listing has run through the years since: conversion from PhonePe Private Limited to PhonePe Limited in April 2025, and a confidential pre-filed draft prospectus with SEBI in September 2025. Reports through 2026 describe an updated draft prospectus, a SEBI observation letter, and then a pause on listing plans amid volatile global markets, with Nigam continuing to affirm the commitment to an Indian listing and suggesting that a change in UPI merchant discount rates would bring a filing closer.

He has meanwhile become one of the more prominent public voices in Indian fintech, arguing the case for financial inclusion at forums such as the Global Fintech Fest, where the questions he tends to press — who pays for payments infrastructure, and what a zero-MDR regime does to the economics of serving small merchants — are precisely the ones his own business model turns on.

Education

Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

MBA

University of Arizona

Master’s, Computer Science