Shashvat Nakrani

Timeline

1. About 1997Born in Bhavnagar, Gujarat, into a family of educators. His father runs an educational institute in the city.
2. School yearsSchooled in Bhavnagar, in a household built around teaching and administering a school.
3. 2015Joins the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and takes up textile technology.
4. 2016 to 2017Starts BookMyHaircut, a small booking business, while still a student, his first attempt at running something of his own.
5. 2018Co-founds BharatPe on the IIT Delhi campus with Bhavik Koladiya, built around one QR code that a shop can use with any payment app.
6. 2018Leaves IIT Delhi before completing the degree to work on the company full time.
7. 2018Ashneer Grover joins the founding team and becomes managing director, the most visible of the three founders.
8. 2019The first institutional investors come in and the merchant network grows beyond the earliest cities.
9. 2020The pandemic pushes small shops towards digital payments and merchant additions rise sharply.
10. 2021The company crosses a billion dollar valuation in a funding round and joins the unicorn list.
11. 2021At 23 he becomes the youngest self made individual on the IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List, on the strength of his stake.
12. 2021BharatPe buys Payback India and, with Centrum, wins the right to take over the failed Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative Bank.
13. 1 November 2021Unity Small Finance Bank, 49 per cent owned by BharatPe and 51 per cent by Centrum, begins operations.
14. 2021Co-founder Bhavik Koladiya leaves and goes to court to reclaim shares he says were transferred without payment.
15. January 2022A leaked audio clip involving Ashneer Grover and a bank sets off a governance review at the company.
16. March 2022The board removes Grover as managing director. Nakrani writes to employees calling the episode an aberration and defending the board's speed.
17. March 2022Grover seeks the removal of chief executive Suhail Sameer from the board, and Nakrani publicly says the chief executive still has his confidence.
18. 2022The company files a criminal complaint against Grover and members of his family, alleging a fraud of about 81 crore rupees. The allegation is denied and is contested.
19. January 2023Nalin Negi joins as finance chief and takes the interim chief executive role after Suhail Sameer steps down.
20. March 2023Nakrani sues Grover in the Delhi High Court over shares he says were never paid for.
21. December 2023The Delhi High Court refuses an interim injunction over the shares but directs that it be given notice of any proposed transfer.
22. April 2024Nalin Negi is confirmed as chief executive of the company.
23. September 2024BharatPe and Grover announce a settlement. Grover ends all association with the company and holds no shares in it.
24. Year to March 2025The company reports adjusted profit before tax of 6 crore rupees, against a loss of 342 crore rupees in the previous financial year.
25. 13 April 2026He announces on LinkedIn that he will step back from day to day operations from 1 May and move to a strategic advisor role, staying on the board.
26. May 2026The change takes effect. He remains the largest individual shareholder, reported at about 10.8 per cent of the company.

Early life and family

Shashvat Nakrani was born in about 1997 in Bhavnagar, a city in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, into a family whose business is education rather than trade or industry.^[1] His father runs an educational institute in the city, and he did his own schooling there, which is an unusual start for the founder of a payments company: the household he grew up in was organised around running a campus.^[1]

The public record of his childhood is thin by the standards of Indian business writing, because he became a founder as a teenager and the coverage of him began with the company rather than with him.^[1] What has been reported is a middle class family in a city known for diamond polishing, ship breaking and, in recent years, a strong record of sending students to the Indian Institutes of Technology.^[1]

His age is documented only indirectly. When the IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List published its 2021 edition, it described him as 23 years old and the youngest self made individual on the list, which places his birth in about 1997 or 1998.^[5][6] No date of birth has been published, and this entry therefore gives an approximate year rather than a false precision.^[5]

That listing mattered more than a ranking normally would. It put the youngest Indian on the country's main rich list at 23, against 37 for the youngest entrant a decade earlier, and it made the point that a stake in a private startup had become a route to paper wealth that the older generation of Indian wealth, built on family businesses, had taken decades to travel.^[6]

He has not spoken about his family in the detail that Indian readers expect of a founder profile, and there is no confirmed public record of a marriage, a spouse or children.^[1] Entries that fill those boxes with guesses do a disservice to the subject, and this one leaves them open.^[1]

Education and the IIT Delhi years

Nakrani joined the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 2015 and studied textile technology, a branch of engineering that sits close to the industry of his home region rather than to software.^[1] The choice of branch is a useful detail: nothing in his training pointed at fintech, and the product he built came out of an observation about shops, not out of a course.^[1]

While he was still at the institute he started BookMyHaircut, a small booking business, which is the first evidence of him running something that had customers rather than an assignment deadline.^[1] Student ventures of that kind usually end quietly, and this one did, but it is where the pattern of his working life starts.^[1]

The idea that became BharatPe came from the market around the campus rather than from a classroom. Merchants were being asked to accept a separate QR code for every payment app, and each code came with a fee or a settlement delay attached, so a shopkeeper with four codes was paying four times for the privilege of being paid.^[1][6]

In 2018 he left the institute before completing the degree to work on the company full time, a decision he has framed in the language founders use about timing: the gap was visible then and would not stay open.^[1] BharatPe was incorporated that year, with Bhavik Koladiya building the first version of the product and Ashneer Grover joining as the third founder and managing director.^[14]

The institute he left is not incidental to the story. The company was founded on the campus, it hired from it, and the co-founder who stayed in the business has consistently described the merchant problem as something he saw around him rather than read about.^[1][14]

Business career and companies

BharatPe is the only company of any size that Nakrani has built, and his career is best read as a single long stretch inside it.^[1] He was its co-founder and, for most of its life, its chief operating officer, which in a payments company means the unglamorous half of the business: merchant acquisition, the operations team, settlement, support and the cost line.^[1][2]

The company's first promise was to charge the merchant nothing for accepting money over a QR code, a position it could hold because the Unified Payments Interface required no interchange fee on those transactions.^[14] That made the product easy to sell and hard to monetise, and everything the company has done since, lending, card machines, consumer credit, a bank stake, is an attempt to earn money from a merchant base that pays nothing for the basic service.^[14]

Growth came fast enough that the company was valued above a billion dollars in 2021, in the same stretch of fundraising that produced a string of Indian unicorns.^[14] A large part of that valuation rested on the argument that a merchant who has been given free payment acceptance can be sold credit, insurance and software later, an argument the company is still proving.^[14]

His public role grew sharply in 2022, when Grover left. The founder who had been the company's voice was gone, and the founder who remained had to explain the business to employees, to investors and to the press.^[7] On 7 March 2022 he wrote to the staff that the Grover episode was an aberration rather than the norm and defended the board as a group of names from Indian banking and financial services.^[7]

He has never been the company's chief executive. Day to day leadership passed to Suhail Sameer and then, from 2023, to Nalin Negi, who joined as finance chief, held the interim chief executive role and was confirmed in it in April 2024.^[14] Nakrani's position has been that of a founder director with an operating portfolio, not the person who carries the profit and loss statement alone.^[14][2]

BharatPe and the single QR code

The technical idea behind BharatPe is small enough to explain in a sentence and large enough to build a company on: one QR code, printed once and stuck on the counter, that accepts money from any payment application because it runs on the interoperability that the Unified Payments Interface provides.^[1][6]

Before that, a shop famous for tea in a Bengaluru lane, or a chemist in a Delhi market, would keep a row of codes belonging to different wallets, each with its own app, fees and settlement cycle.^[1] Nakrani's observation, made while he was a student, was that UPI made all of those codes technically unnecessary, and that merchants would take a single code if someone handed it to them and explained it.^[6]

The company that grew out of that idea was a distribution business as much as a technology business. Between 2019 and 2021 its teams went from city to city signing up small merchants by the thousand, offering the code free of charge and paying small incentives for signing up, and the count of merchants, not a metric from a software dashboard, was the number the company reported.^[14]

What a merchant pays nothing for is a cost centre for the company, so BharatPe's economics depend on the products that sit behind the free code.^[14] The company has added card accepting machines, sound boxes that announce a payment out loud, working capital loans originated with partners, and consumer credit through PostPe, all of it sold to merchants or their customers.^[14]

The bank stake closed the loop, at least in design. Through a 49 per cent holding in Unity Small Finance Bank, the group acquired a licensed institution that can take deposits and lend, which is the part of finance where the margin actually sits.^[14] Whether the group earns more from its merchant base than it spends on acquiring it is the question the next few years of accounts will answer.^[14]

The Grover fallout and the board fight

The most reported period of Nakrani's working life is the one in which he was not the central figure. In January 2022 an audio clip involving Ashneer Grover and an employee of Kotak Mahindra Bank circulated online, an internal review followed, and in March 2022 the board stripped Grover of his titles and positions at BharatPe.^[7]

Nakrani's intervention was a letter to employees rather than a press statement. He wrote that Grover, his co-founder, was no longer associated with the company as an employee, a founder or a director, that Grover had tried to build a false narrative about the business they had built together, and that the board had acted quickly and decisively after receiving the findings of a report from PwC.^[7]

The letter was also a defence of the board itself, which Grover had attacked by questioning the role of an independent director.^[7] Nakrani described the directors as celebrated names from banking and financial services who had been supportive through a difficult period, and he located the episode outside the ordinary running of the company.^[7]

A second front opened within days. Grover asked for the removal of chief executive Suhail Sameer from the board, and Nakrani responded publicly that the chief executive continued to enjoy his confidence and that he had given no consent to any such demand.^[8] That statement is the clearest public evidence of where the remaining founder stood during the fight.^[8]

The company did not stop at removing Grover. It filed a criminal complaint against him and members of his family over an alleged fraud of about 81 crore rupees, an allegation that was denied and has been contested in the courts, and it pursued a clawback of some of his shareholding.^[14] In the press the dispute became inseparable from the company itself, which was the outcome both sides had reason to fear.^[14]

The share dispute and the settlement

BharatPe's shareholding history is a case study in the gap between who works on a company and who owns it. Bhavik Koladiya built the first version of the product, held shares in the early structure of the business, and was left outside it after a change in ownership, and in 2021 he went to court to reclaim shares he said had been transferred without payment for them.^[11][9]

Nakrani's own case against Grover came later. In March 2023 he filed a suit in the Delhi High Court over shares that he said had not been paid for, and in December 2023 the court declined to grant him an interim injunction that would have prevented Grover from transferring or dealing with those shares, while directing that it be given prior notice of any proposed transaction.^[10]

The orders in the case were technical rather than conclusive, and that matters when the dispute is read from outside. A refusal of an interim injunction is not a finding that the claim fails; a direction to give notice of a transfer is not a finding that one is due. What the record shows is two co-founders arguing over the same block of unlisted paper while the company went about its business.^[10]

The argument ended without a judgment. In September 2024 BharatPe and Grover announced a settlement under which the cases against each other would not be pursued, Grover ceased to have any association with the company and held no shares in it.^[12][13] Business Standard reported the settlement as putting a full stop to a dispute that had run for two and a half years and had drawn in the courts, the regulators and the press.^[13]

For Nakrani the settlement removed the last live claim on the cap table he had defended. What he holds now is not disputed by anyone publicly, and the Tracxn data reported when he stepped back from operations put his stake at about 10.8 per cent, the largest single individual holding in the company.^[2]

BharatPe today: lending, the bank and the listing plan

BharatPe in 2026 is a more sober business than the one Nakrani co-founded as a student, and the change is deliberate. The company has narrowed towards lending and the merchant relationship, cut costs, and reported adjusted profit before tax of 6 crore rupees for the year to March 2025 against a loss of 342 crore rupees in the year before.^[4]

The group's most strategic asset is not an app. Through Resilient Innovations, its parent, BharatPe holds 49 per cent of Unity Small Finance Bank, the institution created out of the failed Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative Bank by a consortium of Centrum and BharatPe, which began operations on 1 November 2021 and which a group of depositors challenged in court before the Bombay High Court upheld the merger in 2026.^[14]

Ownership of the bank has not been quiet either. In 2026 BharatPe and Centrum fell into a dispute over a proposed increase in the bank's authorised share capital, and the Delhi High Court restrained the bank from going ahead without BharatPe's written consent, which is a reminder that a 49 per cent stake can block a decision without directing one.^[14]

A listing is the stated destination. Nakrani is travelling from an operating role to an advisory one precisely as the company prepares for a public offer, and the areas he said he would continue to guide are the ones a listing needs: fundraising, initial public offering planning, mergers and acquisitions and long term strategy.^[2][3]

The valuation attached to the company in April 2026 was about 2.7 billion dollars, with about 584 million dollars raised across its history and a ten million dollar debt round as the most recent financing, which is a long way from a student project and a considerable distance from the peak private market numbers that Indian fintech carried in 2021.^[3]

What he owns and the Hurun listing

Nakrani's wealth is not cash and not a portfolio of listed shares. It is an equity holding in a private company, valued by whatever the last funding round said it was worth, which makes every number attached to it provisional.^[2][5]

The stake is large by founder standards. When he moved to an advisory role in April 2026, the Tracxn data reported alongside the announcement put his holding at 10.8 per cent of the company, which made him the single largest individual shareholder on the cap table, ahead of any other founder.^[2] Institutional investors hold the larger blocks, with Peak XV Partners, Beenext and Coatue among them.^[2]

The Hurun India Rich List is where his name first appeared outside fintech circles. The listing admits individuals with a net worth above 1,000 crore rupees, and in 2021 it named him, at 23, as the youngest self made person on it, one of thirteen entrants born in the 1990s whom the list classified as self made.^[5][6]

Indian wealth lists convert unlisted holdings into a rupee figure, and the figure moves with the funding market rather than with the business. That is why his entry in those lists should be read as a valuation of the company applied to a percentage, not as a measure of money in hand, and why a company whose last round was two years ago can drop in a ranking without anything changing at the counter.^[5][6]

Net worth and wealth

No reliable personal net worth figure for Shashvat Nakrani exists in the public record. Forbes and Hurun publish estimates for Indian founders when they can value the stake, and for him the only documented appearance is the Hurun India Rich List of 2021, where the list itself is the source for his inclusion rather than any single quoted number.^[5][6]

An arithmetic reading is possible, and it should be labelled as arithmetic. If the stake is about 10.8 per cent and the company was reported at a valuation of about 2.7 billion dollars in April 2026, the holding works out at roughly 290 million dollars before any discount for illiquidity and dilution.^[2][3] That is a paper value of a private, unlisted shareholding that cannot be sold at that price today.^[3]

The discount is not a technicality. Unlisted shares in Indian fintech companies have traded in the secondary market at meaningful discounts to the last funding round, and a company preparing for a listing can see the private marks reset upwards or downwards when the prospectus is filed.^[14] Anyone quoting his wealth as a fixed sum is quoting a price that no transaction has established.^[14]

What can be said with confidence is the direction of the asset. He retained his shares through the governance crisis, the litigation and the settlement, he remains a director, and the areas he has kept a hand in are those that determine the value of the stake: fundraising, the listing, and acquisitions.^[2][3][4]

Wife, children and family

There is no confirmed public information about Nakrani's marriage, spouse or children. He has not discussed his personal life in interviews, he does not post about it, and the business press that covered his role change in 2026 wrote about his stake and his plans rather than about a family.^[2][3]

What is documented is the family he came from: a household in Bhavnagar in which his father runs an educational institute, which is the environment that shaped his schooling.^[1] That is the extent of the family record, and filling in the rest would mean inventing it.^[1]

The absence of detail is itself characteristic of how he has handled his profile. He is the founder the company's press coverage mentions in a line and the founder it quotes in a statement, while the operating chief executive answers for the business, which keeps a deliberate distance between the person and the product.^[4][7]

Personal life and working style

Nakrani's public presence is thin next to that of the co-founder he outlasted. He writes occasionally on LinkedIn, appears at company events, and speaks to the press when the company's ownership or his own position is at stake, rather than on a schedule of interviews.^[2][7]

The one long statement he has given about his own motives came with his role change. He wrote that building had always meant following curiosity, returning to first principles, and exploring ideas that may not always succeed but are worth pursuing, and he drew a line between the teenager who started the company on campus and the entrepreneur looking at what comes next.^[3]

He has been clear about what the move is not. In the same announcement he said his belief in the company had not changed and that, as the largest individual shareholder, his alignment with its long term success remained absolute, and the company confirmed he would stay on the board as a founder director.^[2][3][4]

People familiar with the company's plans were reported as saying he is expected to build again, which fits the pattern of a founder who has spent his twenties on one company, has no operational role in it, and has the means and the standing to start something new.^[2]

House and property

No property holdings in Nakrani's name have been reported. Indian rich lists occasionally carry details of homes and land for founders whose wealth is realised, and his wealth sits in an unlisted stake, which is why the coverage of him has nothing to say about a house.^[5]

He has been reported as based in Delhi, where BharatPe is headquartered, and his work has kept him in the National Capital Region since his student years at the institute.^[1][4] Any statement beyond that, about a specific address, an apartment or a farmhouse, would be a guess dressed as a fact, and this entry does not make it.^[1]

Awards and recognition

His principal recognition is the one he did not apply for. In 2021 the IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List named him, at 23, as the youngest self made individual on the list, at a time when the youngest entrant a decade earlier had been 37, and the fact was reported by the Economic Times and Hindustan Times as a mark of how quickly Indian startup wealth had moved.^[5][6]

The same list put him among thirteen people born in the 1990s, all classified as self made, and included the founders of twenty six unicorns among its additions that year, which places his entry in a cohort rather than as an isolated curiosity.^[6]

Company side recognition has followed the business rather than him personally. BharatPe has appeared in Indian fintech coverage as one of the firms that took QR acceptance to small merchants at scale, and the valuation milestones the company crossed are the markers his biography is usually told through.^[14]

Philanthropy and public positions

There is no publicly documented philanthropic programme in Nakrani's name. He has not set up a foundation, has not signed public giving pledges, and has not been reported making large personal donations, so an entry that credited him with a giving record would be inventing one.^[1]

The company's social positioning is a different matter and he has been part of it. BharatPe's founding pitch, that a small shop should not have to pay to be paid, is a commercial argument that carries a public benefit, and the company has consistently presented merchant acceptance as a form of financial inclusion.^[14]

He has also taken public positions on the company's own conduct. His letter to employees in March 2022 defended the board, and his statement in 2026 that he was stepping back while keeping his alignment with the company is the sort of founder communication that investors read as a signal about governance.^[7][2]

Controversies and criticism

Nakrani has not been publicly accused of a financial irregularity, and that distinction should be kept clear when the controversies around BharatPe are described. The company's most serious allegations were directed at Ashneer Grover, and they were denied and contested.^[14] The disputes that involved Nakrani directly were about shares, not conduct.^[10]

The share litigation is nonetheless a controversy with his name on it. He sued his own co-founder in the Delhi High Court in March 2023 over shares he said had not been paid for, and the court declined an interim injunction in December 2023, which kept the ownership of the block unsettled until the September 2024 settlement.^[10][12]

The wider criticism of BharatPe was about governance. A leaked recording, an internal review, a boardroom dismissal, a criminal complaint, a dispute over the bank stake and a founder suing a founder gave the company a reputation for conflict that outlasted the events, and every founder who stayed had to live with it.^[7][14]

There is a second and quieter criticism, about the model. Free acceptance is expensive to sustain, and the argument that a merchant acquired at a loss becomes profitable when sold a loan is one that the company has defended for years rather than demonstrated over a full cycle.^[14] The 2026 accounts, with a small adjusted profit before tax and a listing as the goal, are the first real test of it.^[4]

The remaining criticism attaches to his departure rather than to him. A founder leaving operations while the company prepares to list invites the question of who is accountable for the numbers in the prospectus, and the answer the company gave, that he remains a director and will guide the listing, is the same answer every such transition produces.^[3][4]

Reading the numbers

Three numbers define his position, and each needs a date. The stake of about 10.8 per cent was reported in April 2026, the valuation of about 2.7 billion dollars was reported in the same month, and the total raised of about 584 million dollars is a cumulative figure across the company's funding history.^[2][3] Any of the three can change with the next round or the listing.^[3]

The company's profitability is the number to watch next. Adjusted profit before tax of 6 crore rupees for the year to March 2025 is a genuine turn from a loss of 342 crore rupees in the previous year, and it is also an adjusted figure, which means it excludes items the company chooses to set aside.^[4] A listed company has to explain those items to the market.^[4]

For a reader trying to judge his wealth, the honest summary is short. He owns roughly a tenth of an unlisted company that has just turned marginally profitable, disclosed a valuation of about 2.7 billion dollars, and wants to list, and his personal net worth therefore moves with decisions other people will take.^[3][4]

The questions people search about Shashvat Nakrani

• Who is Shashvat Nakrani? He is the co-founder of BharatPe, the Indian merchant payments company he started on the IIT Delhi campus in 2018 with Bhavik Koladiya and Ashneer Grover.
• How old is Shashvat Nakrani? About 29 in 2026. The Hurun India rich list described him as 23 in its 2021 edition, which is the only public record of his age.
• Where was Shashvat Nakrani born? In Bhavnagar, Gujarat, into a family of educators. His father runs an educational institute in the city.
• What is Shashvat Nakrani's education? He joined IIT Delhi in 2015 and studied textile technology, and left in 2018 before completing the degree to build BharatPe.
• What was his first business? BookMyHaircut, a booking venture he started while still a student in Delhi.
• What is Shashvat Nakrani's stake in BharatPe? Reported at about 10.8 per cent, the largest individual holding on the cap table, according to Tracxn data reported in April 2026.
• What is Shashvat Nakrani's net worth? There is no reliable published figure. His wealth is his unlisted stake, and on the company's reported valuation of about 2.7 billion dollars that stake works out arithmetically at a few hundred million dollars.
• Is Shashvat Nakrani still with BharatPe? Yes. He stepped back from day to day operations as chief operating officer on 1 May 2026 and moved to a strategic advisor role while remaining a director.
• Who are BharatPe's founders? Ashneer Grover, Shashvat Nakrani and Bhavik Koladiya, who built the first version of the product. BharatPe describes the three as its founders.
• Why did Shashvat Nakrani sue Ashneer Grover? He filed a suit in the Delhi High Court in March 2023 over shares he said had not been paid for. The court refused an interim injunction in December 2023, and the case ended in a settlement in September 2024.
• Is Shashvat Nakrani married? No marriage or spouse has been publicly confirmed.
• What is BharatPe worth today? The company was reported at a valuation of about 2.7 billion dollars in April 2026, with about 584 million dollars raised in total and a stock market listing stated as a goal.
• Who runs BharatPe now? Nalin Negi, who joined as finance chief, took the interim chief executive role in 2023 and was confirmed as chief executive in April 2024.

Related entries