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Bengaluru Mohit Bedi was a successful banker with a major private sector bank but the fast-paced activity in the start-up sector was a siren song. He quit his job to join a start-up PayU as a senior executive, but within nine months decided to quit that and start-up on his own.
“I wanted to create something that would leave a legacy behind,” says Bedi. Thus, was born credit-on-UPI start-up, Kiwi, which he co-founded with Siddharth Mehta, who quit as Managing Director of Freecharge. Kiwi has raised almost $19 million in funding this year and opened its product to consumers in June.
new venture
Bedi is not alone. Several senior executives in the start-up ecosystem are launching out on their own. Take Dale Vaz who quit as the chief technology officer at Swiggy and has launched his own fintech company, Aaritya Technologies. Vaz’s new venture is likely to be a personalised trading platform and has already raised seed capital from the likes of Elevation Capital and Accel.
To be sure in the past too executives have left to launch their ventures, but this is a trend which seems to have gained momentum in the recent past.
Investment drought
The Indian start-up ecosystem saw a worsening of the investment drought in 2023 with it falling by 73 per cent to $7 billion in 2023 from $25 billion in 2022, according to data intelligence platform Tracxn. However, this hasn’t discouraged people from plunging out on their own. Senior executives across functions of technology, engineering and product are launching out in domains such as fintech, healthcare artificial intelligence and others. “This trend is fuelled by a desire for greater autonomy, innovation, and the pursuit of new challenges outside the traditional landscape,” says Bedi. Additionally, new opportunities have opened up in fintech and healthcare.
Many more executives have been quietly building their new ventures in stealth and are yet to fully announce them, like – former Flipkart director of product management Amit Velingkar, ex-director of engineering at Razorpay’s Vinay Shivappa and Sanjay Suri a former CTO and CPO at Nykaa.
Anirudh A Damani, Managing Partner – Artha Venture Fund, says the experience that the senior executives who have dipped their feet in start-ups would have accumulated equips them with patience, innovation, and a unique ability to adapt, distinguishing them from those with more traditional corporate backgrounds.
“Having navigated the challenging and unstructured growth phases of start-ups, these individuals are adept at handling the chaos and pace inherent in these environments. This phenomenon is underscored by the emergence of ‘founder mafias’ from established start-ups like Flipkart, PayPal and Paytm. These groups, comprising former early-stage executives, have successfully ventured into founding innovative start-ups,” says Damani.
C-suite executives, leveraging their extensive experience, are increasingly embracing entrepreneurship for several key reasons ranging from overcoming career stagnation, and the potential for disproportionate financial gains, notes Kartik Narayan, CEO – Staffing, TeamLease Services.
“These seasoned professionals recognise that ascending to the pinnacle of corporate leadership often involves risks comparable to those faced when venturing into entrepreneurial roles. Motivated by a desire to maximise their impact and achievements, they’re taking bold leaps into new ventures,” Narayan says.
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