 "ZestMoney founders Lizzie Chapman and Ashish Anantharaman are launching a new startup called ‘SwiffyLabs’")
Lizzie Chapman and Ashish Anantharaman, the founders of “buy now pay later” (BNPL) firm ZestMoney, have launched a startup called SwiffyLabs, a business-to-business (B2B) fintech company building infrastructure for banks and financial institutions, according to sources.
The venture has received backing from Jio Platforms, a subsidiary of Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Industries, according to people familiar with the development.
This development comes almost a month after ZestMoney, founded in 2015, shut down amid an unsuccessful attempt to revive its business under new management and regulatory uncertainty.
Chapman and Anantharaman had left ZestMoney in May 2023.
The goal of their new venture is to help financial institutions launch new-age products like embedded finance and invoice financing, and to take advantage of the advancements in artificial intelligence and digital public infrastructure (DPI).
“They have been on a hiring spree, roping in tech and product talent,” said a person familiar with the development. An email query to Chapman and Jio Platforms remained unanswered.
With the Indian internet economy projected to reach $1 trillion by 2030, DPI is primed to continue playing a significant role in democratising this growth and ensuring a digital future that is inclusive and expansive, according to a report by consulting firm Redseer Strategy Consultants.
Anticipating the future, Redseer expects the next wave of DPI-driven opportunities in retail, insurance, health care, and agritech. Startups will also combine different DPIs in innovative ways to create offers or fundamentally improve existing ones in terms of cost, speed, and experience. This has been accelerated by increased access to smartphones and highly affordable mobile data, which benefited nearly 800 million people.
Startups have been among the early adopters of the “digital” and “public” nature of DPI. The speed of DPI adoption has helped them scale up rapidly and, in many cases, upstage traditional players in their sectors. Redseer’s analyses show DPI has helped unlock value of over $100 billion in Indian startups across sectors.
ZestMoney, another of whose founders was Priya Sharma, allowed customers to pay for products over time but use them right away. Last year in May, the founders resigned, several weeks after fintech giant PhonePe decided to halt its proposed acquisition of the company. The deal was to fetch between $150-300 million.
The firm had been finding it challenging to raise fresh capital amid a funding winter.
In April, ZestMoney had laid off 100 employees, or about 20 per cent of its workforce. After the three founders of ZestMoney stepped down, the Goldman Sachs-backed fintech startup created a leadership team. At its peak, ZestMoney had a registered user base of 17 million and was live at 85,000 retail touchpoints across India. It had a valuation of $470 million.
However, many lenders or non-banking financial companies that worked with ZestMoney stopped their engagement with the company after the Reserve Bank of India tightened rules for digital lending and norms for personal loans, according to people familiar with the matter.
In a town hall meeting on December 5, the new management told employees the firm was winding down and would lay off the remaining 130 employees. A small team was retained to undertake the company’s closing down process.
