Ashneer Grover, Managing Director and co-founder of BharatPe, has resigned from the fintech firm with immediate effect.
Grover’s resignation from BharatPe comes soon after he lost an arbitration with the Singapore International Arbitration Centre (SIAC), claiming the company’s probe against him was illegal.
Grover has also resigned as a director of the Board, but will continue as the single largest individual shareholder of the company.
In his resignation letter Grover wrote, “I write this with a heavy heart as today I am being forced to bid adieu to a company of which I am a founder. I say with my head held high that today this company stands as a leader in the fintech world.”
He further said, “I’ve been embroiled in baseless and targeted attacks on me and my family by a few individuals who are ready not only to harm me and my reputation but also harm the reputation of the company, which ostensibly they are trying to protect.”
“From being celebrated as the face of Indian entrepreneurship and an inspiration to the Indian youth to build their own businesses, I am now wasting myself fighting a long, lonely battle against my own investors and management. Unfortunately, in this battle, the management has lost what is actually at stake – BharatPe,” Grover added.
“BharatPe was the last entrant in UPI space and competed with goliaths like PayTM, PhonePe and GooglePay – but it still emerged as a leader in the industry. I had the vision to disrupt payments with ‘0% MDR’, lending with shopkeeper ‘loans against payments’, P2P with ‘12%Club’ and BNPL with ‘postpe’. With my efforts and hard work, the Company has created a network of more than 1 Crore (10M) shopkeepers who transact more than Rs 100,000 Crores (US$ 16B) annually and lent out more than Rs 4,000 crores (US$ 0.5B) as loans. It is indisputable that BharatPe loans have helped lakhs of small businesses fight organized e-commerce and COVID,” he added.
