Bipin Preet Singh has said he left South Delhi for Dwarka because South Delhi cost too much. That was 2009, and the new flat was not just a home. It was the first office of MobiKwik.
He was an IIT Delhi graduate, class of 2002, who had worked at chip companies including Intel, Nvidia and Freescale. His wife, Upasana Taku, was in her own corporate job. Neither was happy. A profile reports that Singh put in life savings of about ₹8 lakh, though that comes from a promotional source and should be held loosely. The couple, by their own telling, wanted out of the corporate track.
A profile reports that Singh put in life savings of about ₹8 lakh, though that comes from a promotional source and should be held loosely.
Singh was the technical one. He built the site and the payment options himself, and in a Quartz interview he recalled that the early system needed rebooting so often that he carried his laptop everywhere. A payments company whose founder cannot leave his laptop is a fragile thing. The product was a mobile wallet at a time when few Indians trusted putting money into one.
What almost nobody remembers is how long it stayed small. The RBI authorised the wallet in 2013. Funding came in 2015 with a $25 million round led by Tree Line Asia, and another $50 million in 2016. Then November 2016 happened. When the government pulled high-value notes, MobiKwik transactions rose 400%, and a company that had been explaining itself for seven years suddenly had users arriving unprompted.
The trouble followed the growth. In May 2020 the app disappeared briefly from Google Play over an ads policy violation. In early 2021 a researcher claimed hackers had taken KYC data on nearly 100 million users; the company first denied it and later commissioned an outside forensic audit. In 2022 it suspended wallet transfers to major crypto exchanges. In September 2024 it froze withdrawals on its Xtra peer-to-peer lending product, and customers were angry.
The IPO it filed in 2021 for ₹1,900 crore was shelved. In December 2024 it tried again, raised ₹572 crore, and listed on the NSE and BSE. The last full-year numbers in hand, for FY24, show revenue of ₹875 crore and a net profit of ₹14 crore: a company that took fifteen years to turn the corner, and only just.
The lesson for a first-time founder is smaller than the headline. Singh did not win by being first or loudest. He stayed alive long enough, in a rented flat that doubled as an office, for the country to catch up to the thing he had already built.