Bharatpe – A Unicorn Start-Up in the Indian FinTech Industry

Bharatpe – A Unicorn Start-Up in the Indian FinTech Industry
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Bharatpe – A Unicorn Start-Up in the Indian FinTech Industry
1. Introduction
Businesses today rely on digital technologies to interact with the target market and deliver value to customers. The digital landscape introduced a paradigm shift by providing convenience to customers and encouraging spending on different products and services. As a result, customers demand convenience in product accessibility and payment options to satisfy impulse behavior. Most customers prefer a cashless shopping experience, which evolved Financial Technology (FinTech) to facilitate end-to-end channel delivery (Karim et al., 2022). This paper aims to evaluate the entrepreneurial story, purpose, challenges, segmentation, and value proposition of Bharatpe, a prominent start-up that revolutionized the FinTech industry in India.
2. Discussion
2.1 Entrepreneurial Story of the Start-Up
Ashneer Grover and Shashvat Nakrani identified an emerging market in the digital landscape in a complex Indian economy. The co-founders identified that shopkeepers experience challenges in becoming cashless transformation. Indian shopkeepers require a single platform that accepts payments from multiple merchants (Bharat & Banerjee, 2022). Bharatpe facilitated the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) for shopkeepers by providing a QR core, which would accept payments from PayTM, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and PhonePe. Bharatpe accepts payments from more than 150 UPI applications. The company charges zero transaction costs from shopkeepers. Bharatpe also provides loans to shopkeepers at an interest rate of 12%, which is approved by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI; Bharatpe, 2023). Bharatpur became a Unicorn in FY2021 with a valuation of USD2.85 billion.
2.2 Entrepreneurial Challenges
Bharatpe reported different challenges since 2018. The company underwent corporate restructuring to overcome emerging challenges. Bharatpe needs corporate governance, which raises continuous conflicts between employees. Grover, the co-founder of Bharatpe, is alleged to commit corporate crimes, including misuse of assets, consumption of the company’s finances for personal use, and related ethical violations. The lack of governance led Grover to depart from the company in FY2022 under the Companies Act 2013 (Chadha & Vashishtha, 2022). Besides, Bharatpe experienced a significant challenge of ‘God Syndrome.’ Grover was driving the company single-handedly without engaging other board members and stakeholders. Critical decisions were taken by Grover, creating a toxic culture within the company (ToI, 2022). Bharatpe had significant challenges after becoming a FinTech Unicorn in India.
2.3 Validating Value Creation and Propositions of the Start-Up
The business model proposed by Bharatpe was a unique selling proposition (USP) for shopkeepers in India. Bharatpe’s value proposition offered accessibility, cost-efficacy, and comprehensive inclusion of different UPI payment modes on a single platform. Shopkeepers and merchants nationwide could accept payments from different...