Meet man who left IIT to build Rs 23000 crore company at 19, he is youngest person to...

IIT graduates often get high salary package job offers from big corporate companies. They get hired during their last year of college. They study hard to crack the JEE exam to get a seat in prestigious institutes for pursuing engineering. However, there are many examples of IITians who dropped out of their IIT college to pursue a different career or to start their venture. One such person who co-founded his company is Shashvat Nakrani. He is the co-founder BharatPe payment app and is currently the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the company. He started the venture with Ashneer Grover in 2018. He is an IIT Delhi dropped out who left college in his third year. He was 19 years old when he co-founded BharatPe.

In 2021, he became the youngest person to feature in the IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List. At the time, he was 23. Nakrani was among the 13 other self-made billionaires born in the 90s. Hurun India Rich List is a ranking of individuals with a net worth of over Rs 1,000 crore. BharatPe had last raised USD 370 million in funding in 2021 at a valuation of USD 2.9 billion (around Rs 23000 crore today). 

He was pursuing his bachelor’s degree in Textile Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT Delhi). Nakrani identified a large gap in the market, the presence of a payment gateway that was accessible to merchants that did not cut into their margins. To develop a payment gateway that fulfilled these requirements, he made use of the interoperability feature of the Unified Payment Interface (UPI). This is how ‘BharatPe’ came into existence.

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