Latest news with #Sikaria
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Business Standard
20-05-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Flipkart-backed super.money eyes neo-bank play in India's fintech race
Flipkart-backed fintech firm has its eyes set on executing a neo-banking strategy, building on its rapid growth on India's real-time payments system, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). The Bengaluru-based company, which will complete a year since its operational launch in July, is targeting a place among the top five neo-banks in India, as the market expands with the growth of the digital financial services ecosystem. 'In India, because of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and UPI, there will emerge 10 to 20 neo-banks. We want to be one of the top three to five players... While everybody does mobile banking, how do you truly make it mobile-native is the opportunity,' Prakash Sikaria, chief executive officer (CEO) of told Business Standard. 'We will be doing every other financial services product that a bank does. It could be wealth, mutual funds, or insurance. The good part is we don't need to be tied to one banking service, so we try to get the best product for our customers. This is what I think of neo-banking,' he added. Sikaria noted that in its current avatar, the company would continue to follow a distribution-first approach — a strategy commonly used by fintechs in India. However, he indicated that as the firm scales, it may explore manufacturing its own financial products. 'Thus far we have not felt the need to go and create the products on our own. We prefer co-creating. But in future, as we go deeper into any of these and the need arises, we may,' he added. Cashbacks As of April, the company ranks fifth on the UPI leaderboard, processing 175.24 million transactions — one of the fastest trajectories for any third-party application to reach such volumes. Sikaria said the company's success stemmed from tapping demand for a fresh platform and its early focus on the scan-and-pay market, which refers to peer-to-merchant (P2M) transactions. The company also offers a 5 per cent cashback on every transaction — a feature that, alongside other operational levers, results in a monthly average cash burn of Rs 10 to Rs 20 per user. Currently, the platform has 10 million monthly active users, with 15 million total app downloads. 'We never gave activation cashbacks. We rather repurposed it to make it a feature of the product. It has worked in that context… I don't think we need to slow down on rewards. I think what we need to do is rev up our revenue engines to fund those rewards,' he said.
Mint
23-04-2025
- Business
- Mint
Dailyhunt's parent VerSe's group CFO resigns amid other exits in finance team
Mumbai: Sandip Basu, the group chief financial officer (CFO) of Dailyhunt's parent company, VerSe Innovation, resigned earlier this month due to personal health reasons, two sources familiar with the matter told Mint . 'The exit is due to health reasons and the company has begun searching for his replacement," one of the two people cited above said. VerSe's finance team has also seen other exits with Rajiv Sikaria and Piyush Agarwal stepping down over the last year, according to the second person. These exits come at a pivotal time for VerSe, which has been actively acquiring companies, facing delays in financial audits, and preparing for an initial public offering (IPO). Read this | Dailyhunt parent VerSe is betting on AI, cost cuts for a turnaround after a tough FY24. Will it work? A VerSe spokesperson confirmed Basu's resignation, and also downplayed the impact of the other departures, saying that they were not at a senior level and were typical for a finance team of 85–100 members. Sikaria, who was responsible for mergers and acquisitions and served as CFO for BMEG and BMEG Mena, resigned in July last year, according to his LinkedIn profile. Agarwal, who headed corporate finance, accounting, taxation, M&A, treasury, and investor relations, also departed recently. Basu's resignation comes more than three years after he joined VerSe as group CFO, tasked with overseeing the company's internal systems and processes. He previously held senior roles at Bharti Telecom Ltd, BPL Mobile Group, XCEL Telecom, and Loop Mob. Emails sent to Sikaria and Agarwal did not receive a response by the time of publication, and emails to Basu bounced back. In 2018, Bedi joined forces with VerSe's founder Virendra Kumar Gupta as co-founder of Dailyhunt. The parent company was established in 2007. The platform targets affluent English speaking individuals in tier 1 cities as well as the mass affluent, educated audience in tier 2 cities who prefer local language content. In the past year, VerSe has aggressively expanded, acquiring a majority stake in India-focused digital marketing agency Valueleaf Group in August 2024, shortly after its largest deal to date—buying US-based subscription service Magzter in April 2024 for an undisclosed sum. VerSe's co-founder, Umang Bedi, told Mint last year that the company is 'acquisition-hungry," seeking to broaden its user base, explore monetization opportunities, and diversify content offerings. The company plans to fund these acquisitions through a combination of cash and stock. Over the past five years, VerSe has acquired the social media app GolBol, photo-video sharing app Vebbler, AI solutions provider Cognirel, and online news platform Local Play, according to data from Tracxn. It has spent under $100 million on each acquisition. Read this | Fast and furious: Early-stage startups tweak supply chain operations as they shift to quick commerce lane As VerSe prepares for its IPO, the search for a new CFO has become urgent. While Bedi did not disclose a timeline for the listing, he expects the company to break even in the next three to four months and to turn profitable in FY26. Bedi anticipates stronger revenues driven by AI-powered innovations, deeper monetization across platforms—including Dailyhunt, Josh, NextVerSe AI, and VerSe Collab—and a recovery in the advertising market. For FY24, VerSe's revenue declined to ₹ 1,261 crore, down from ₹ 1,356 crore in FY23. However, its Ebitda burn, which excludes non-cash expenses, narrowed to ₹ 710 crore, compared to ₹ 1,448 crore the previous year. The company has forecast a 75% revenue growth in FY25 and expects to reduce its burn by 30–40% through aggressive cuts in marketing expenses and integration of acquisitions. It has yet to file its audited results for FY24. Also read | Gaja Capital set to become first Indian PE firm to go public with plan for ₹ 500 cr IPO VerSe raised $805 million at a $5 billion valuation in April 2022, with investors including Goldman Sachs, Falcon Edge Capital, Sequoia Capital India, Omidyar Network India, and Matrix Partners. The company has no immediate plans to raise further capital. In India's short-video space, VerSe's Josh competes with Mohalla Tech's Moj and ShareChat, both of which gained traction after TikTok was banned in India in 2020.
