The Stanford Engineer Who Survived India's Fintech Crash: How Upasana Taku Remortgaged Her Home, Survived a 96% Valuation Collapse, and Took a $450 Million Company Public
In the winter of 2016, Upasana Taku sat at her kitchen table in Gurugram and calculated how long her company had to live. The answer was eight weeks. MobiKwik, the digital payments platform she had co-founded seven years earlier with her husband Bipin Preet Singh, was burning through its remaining cash at a rate that would exhaust its reserves by February. The Indian startup ecosystem was in the grip of a funding winter so severe that once-celebrated unicorns were collapsing into fire sales. Venture capitalists who had once returned her calls within hours were no longer answering. The valuation at which she had raised her last round — a number she no longer speaks about publicly, but which industry sources placed at roughly $250 million — had become a liability rather than an asset. No new investor would touch the company at anything close to that price. No existing investor was willing to lead a bridge. The only people who believed MobiKwik would survive were the two people sitting at the kitchen table.
