Sameer Nigam is an Indian entrepreneur and co-founder of PhonePe, a digital platform for fast payments and financial services. He is also the CEO of PhonePe.
Wiki/Biography
Sameer Nigam was born in 1978 in Mumbai (now Mumbai), India (46 years old in 2024). He spent his teenage years in Delhi and Noida. In the 1990s, he moved to Hira Andani Gardens in Bombay (now Mumbai), where he completed his college education. From 2007 to 2009, he studied for an MBA at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a graduate student in computer science at the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA.
appearance
Height (approximately): 5′8″
Hair color: salt and pepper (semi-bald)
Eye color: black
family
Parents and siblings
Sameer Nigam’s father is an IIT graduate who served in the Indian Navy early in his career. After working in the Navy, he joined Larsen & Toubro. He has worked on several projects including INS Arihant and Chandrayan. His mother worked for TCS (Tata Consultancy Services Ltd) in the early 1970s and was one of the earliest employees of the organization. She taught herself computer science and earned a Ph.D. Later in her life, she became a serial entrepreneur in the early 1980s. Sameer talked about his mother’s entrepreneurial experience in an interview and said she founded her first company in the mid-1980s. He also talked about how she passed the IAS exam in the first try when she was in her 40s. Samir has an older sister who is a mathematics professor in Canada.
wife and children
Sameer Nigam’s wife is from Bandra, Mumbai. She is a strategic consultant. Sameer Nigam has a daughter and a son.
Profession
Sameer built the proprietary shopping search engine for Shopzilla Inc. and served as Director of Product Management. In 2009, he founded Mime360, a Mumbai-based startup. Mime360 is a digital media distribution platform that streams music and helps content owners connect with content publishers. The startup was acquired by Flipkart in 2011 and Sameer Nigam started working at Flipkart. He became Flipkart’s Senior Vice President of Engineering and Vice President of Marketing. Sameer founded PhonePe in 2015 along with friends Rahul Chari and Burzin Engineer. In 2016, PhonePe was acquired by Flipkart and became its wallet application. On December 23, 2022, Flipkart completely separated from Phonepe. In a press release issued by PhonePe, Sameer Nigam spoke about this and said:
Flipkart and PhonePe are proud Indian brands, each with a user base of over 400 million. We look forward to the next phase of growth as we invest in new businesses such as insurance, wealth management and lending, while also driving the next wave of growth in UPI payments in India. This will help drive our vision of financial inclusion for billions of Indians. “
PhonePe is a successful decacorn (a company valued at over $10 billion) and one of India’s leading UPI-based currency exchange companies with over 500 million registered users by 2023. PhonePe also provides various financial services including insurance, investment, loans, ETC.
Awards and Honors
- Sameer Nigam received the Wharton Venture Capital Award in 2009.
- In 2018, he was included in the list of 40 top business leaders in India Inc. by The Economic Times.
- In 2021, Samir was honored with the IDMA Person of the Year Hall of Fame Award.
- In 2022, he received the Marketer of the Year – UPI Award at the IAA Leadership Awards.
His business PhonePe has won several awards including:-
- In 2018, PhonePe was awarded the title of “Outstanding Merchant UPI Player” by NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India).
- In 2018, PhonePe won the IndIAA Award for the Best Marketing Campaign in the Telecom & Technology Category.
- In 2019, PhonePe won the 9th IAMAI India Digital Award.
- In 2019, PhonePe won the Best Digital Wallet Initiative award at the 8th Annual India Retail & E-Retail Awards.
- In 2020, PhonePe won the Excellence in Wealth Technology Award at the ET BFSI Innovation Tribe Virtual Summit and Awards Ceremony.
- In 2021, PhonePe won the Gold Award for Excellence in Wealth Management and the Silver Award for Unstoppable India Campaign at the IAMAI India Digital Awards 2021 for its mutual fund products.
- In the same year, PhonePe won the Excellence in Insurtech Award at the ASSOCHAM Annual Fintech Digital Payments Awards.
- In 2022, PhonePe won the annual Fintech Award at the BW Fintech Awards.
- In 2023, PhonePe won the Best Product/Service Innovation Award (Jury’s Choice Award) at the ET BFSI Excellence Awards for its ‘End-to-End Digital Journey in Auto Insurance’ initiative.
- In 2023, PhonePe won the Young Turk of the Year Award at the CNBC-TV18 India Business Leadership Awards (IBLA). 9t
Sameer Nigam wins Young Turk Award for PhonePe
salary
He earned Rs. 177 million as per the 2017 report.
Facts/Trivia
- In an interview, Sameer Nigam spoke about having to multi-task in different roles along with other employees after being acquired by Flipkart and how this affected them, saying:
I think everyone becomes an experienced entrepreneur [because] You basically play every role…you’re a lawyer, a marketer, a copywriter, and a programmer. So it helps a lot of us. I think the reason why it works well is if you look at the team, one level below Sachin and Binny, a lot of people have strong technical backgrounds or business backgrounds, or both. “
- In 2022, PhonePe will move its headquarters from Singapore to India. PhonePe will have to pay a tax of Rs 8,000 crore for this.
- In an interview, he talked about his friend and PhonePe co-founder Rahul Chari, who has known him for more than 20 years, and said:
So I’m just saying, considering how long we’ve known each other, Chari and I were doing undergrad in Mumbai, so we’ve known each other since 1995, so that’s 26 years now. His wife is a junior in our college, I mean, literally, our families all know each other, we were roommates in Arizona, so I thought it would be very, very easy.
Sameer Nigam (right) and Rahul Chari (left)
- Sameer Nigam is the owner of Mumbai Meteors, a volleyball team that competes in the RuPay Prime Volleyball League. In an interview, he talked about his love for volleyball and the scope of the league to push the sport to the next level, saying:
As a regular volleyball player, I am well aware of the appeal of this sport. The PVL provides us with a great opportunity to take the sport to a world-class level in a professional manner. “
Smaeer Nigam (right) supports his team Mumbai Meteors
Categories: Biography
Source: HIS Education