Upasana Taku- Here’s how women entrepreneurs are transforming the fintech landscape - one product and platform at a time

 According to Think to Launch Research Data, in the last 12 odd years, close to 214 fintech and financial services startups have been founded by women as founders and co-founders. One of them is also an IPO-bound startup - MobiKwik. The data further reveals that between 2015 and 2021, women founder led fintech startups won approximately 22 deals, amounting to $40.34 million. 

During the same time frame, there were 130 deals by startups that had one woman co-founder and other male founders, amounting to $2.38 billion. The stark contrast in numbers is revealing of a discrepancy -between startups with solo women founders raising funding versus startups with women as co-founders raising funding. 

Nevertheless, while these figures paint a dismal picture of the funding scenario, many women entrepreneurs in the segment believe that the market is slowly but surely opening up for female founders. 

With a focus on payments, lending, microfinance, and even stock markets, these founders are paving the way for more women entrepreneurs in the segment.  

But what makes the segment lucrative for women and what can spur more women founders in financial services and fintech? 

Upasana Taku, Co-founder, MobiKwik

“Building MobiKwik has been the most exhilarating experience of my life. My Co-founder Bipin and I started this digital wallet in 2009, when India was completely a cash economy. Everyone advised us to do something mainstream, but we were confident that digital will be mainstream in the times to come,” says Upasana. 

While many disapproved the idea of her starting up, the negative chatter and prejudice simply encouraged Upasana more, and against all odds, Bipin and Upasana built MobiKwik.

It was bootstrapped for the first four years, and has achieved its current scale of 120 million  registered users having spent only $100 million since inception. 

“Today, we are focused on Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) for daily life payments and have the largest number of pre-approved BNPL users in India at 24 million,” says Upasana. 

She believes, although things have evolved since 2009, the key challenges any entrepreneur in the fintech space go through are ideating on the busines idea, hiring the right people, and selling the vision to customers and investors. 

“These are the few aspects that would govern the way of business and to an extent forecast its success tangent. The constantly evolving sector demands present and new entrepreneurs to stay on their feet and build products that not only cover the basics but also cater to the rising demand of financially aware, digitally savvy customers,” 


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