Sameer Nigam Wiki, Age, Wife, Family, Biography & More

Sameer Nigam is an Indian entrepreneur and co-founder of PhonePe, a digital platform for quick payments and financial services. He is also the CEO of PhonePe.

Wiki/Biography

Sameer Nigam was born in 1978 (age 46 years; as of 2024) in Bombay (now Mumbai), India. He spent his pre-teen years in Delhi and Noida. In the 1990s, he moved to Hiranandani Gardens, Bombay (now Mumbai), where he completed his college education. ^[1]Youtube – CNBC TV18 He studied MBA at the Wharton Business School University of Pennsylvania, USA, from 2007 to 2009. He is a postgraduate in Computer Science from the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA.

Physical Appearance

Height (approx.): 5′ 8″

Hair Colour: Salt and Pepper (semi-bald)

Eye Colour: Black

Family

Parents & Siblings

Sameer Nigam’s father is an IIT graduate and served in the Indian Navy at the beginning of his career. After working in the Navy, he joined Larsen & Toubro. He has worked on various projects including INS Arihant and Chandrayan. His mother worked at TCS (Tata Consultancy Services Limited), in the early 1970s as one of the earliest employees of the organisation. She learned Computer Science on her own and has a PhD. Later in her life, she became a serial entrepreneur in the early 1980s. Sameer talked about his mother’s entrepreneurship in an interview and said she established her first firm in the mid-1980s. He also talked about how when she was in her 40s, she passed the IAS exam on her first attempt. Sameer has a sister, who is a Math professor in Canada.

Wife & Children

Sameer Nigam’s wife is from Bandra, Mumbai. She is a strategy consultant. Sameer Nigam has a daughter and a son.

Career

Sameer built the proprietary shopping search engine for Shopzilla Inc., where he worked as the Director of Product Management. In 2009, he founded Mime360, a startup based out in Mumbai. Mime360 is a digital media distribution platform that can stream music and help content owners get in touch with content publishers. The startup was acqui-hired by Flipkart in 2011 and Sameer Nigam started to work in Flipkart. He became the Senior Vice President of Engineering and Vice President of Marketing at Flipkart. In 2015, Sameer founded PhonePe with his friends, Rahul Chari and Burzin Engineer. In 2016, PhonePe was acquired by Flipkart and became its wallet app. On 23 December 2022, Flipkart completely separated itself from Phonepe. In the press release given by PhonePe, Sameer Nigam talked about it and said,

Flipkart and PhonePe are proud, homegrown Indian brands with a user base upwards of 400 million each. We are looking forward to the next phase of our growth as we invest in new businesses – like insurance, wealth management and lending, while also enabling the next wave of growth for UPI payments in India. This will help propel our vision to provide billions of Indians with financial inclusion.”

Awards & Honours

• Sameer Nigam was awarded with the Wharton Venture Award in 2009.

• In 2018, he was listed in the Economic Times 40 under Forty list of India Inc.’s top business leaders.

• In 2021, Sameer won the Hall of Fame Award as IDMA Person of the Year.

• In 2022, he received the Marketer Of The Year – UPI Award at the IAA Leadership Awards.

His venture, PhonePe, has won multiple awards including:-

• In 2018, PhonePe was honoured with the ‘Outstanding Merchant UPI Player’ by the NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India).

• In 2018, PhonePe won the Best campaign under the Telecom & Technology category at the IndIAA Awards.

• In 2019, PhonePe won the IAMAI’s 9th India Digital Awards.

• In 2019, PhonePe won the Best Digital Wallet Initiative award at the 8th Annual Indian Retail & eRetail Awards.

• In 2020, PhonePe won the Excellence in WealthTech award at the ET BFSI Innovation Tribe Virtual Summit & Awards.

• In 2021, PhonePe’s Mutual Funds product won a Gold award for Excellence in Wealth Management and a Silver award for the Unstoppable India campaign in the Online Video category at the IAMAI India Digital Awards.

• In the same year, PhonePe won the Excellence in InsurTech Award at the ASSOCHAM Annual FinTech Digital Payments Awards.

• In 2022, PhonePe won the Fintech of the Year Award at the BW Festival of FinTech Awards.

• In 2023, PhonePe won the Best Product/Service Innovation (Jury’s Choice) for their initiative of ‘End-to-end digital journey for Motor insurance’ at the ET BFSI Excellence Awards.

• In 2023, PhonePe won the Young Turk of the Year Award at CNBC-TV18’s India Business Leader Awards (IBLA).9t
  

  Sameer Nigam receiving the Young Turk Award for PhonePe

Salary

He was earning Rs. 17.7 crores as per the reports in 2017. ^[2]Business Insider India

Facts/Trivia

• Sameer Nigam talked about having to multitask in different roles along with other employees and how it affected them after being acqui-hired by Flipkart, in an interview, and said,
  

  I think everyone becomes a much more seasoned entrepreneur [because] you’re basically playing every function…you’re a lawyer and a marketer, a copywriter, and a coder. So it helped a lot of us. I think why it worked well was if you see that team, one level below Sachin and Binny, a lot of the folks had a strong tech background or business background, or both.”

• In 2022, PhonePe moved its headquarters from Singapore to India. PhonePe had to pay a tax of Rs 8,000 crore for this move.

• He talked about knowing his friend and PhonePe co-founder, Rahul Chari for more than 20 years, in an interview, and said,
  

  So I was just saying that I think given how long we’d known each other Chari and I went to undergrad in Bombay so we’ve known each other since 1995, so it’s 26 years now. His wife was a junior of ours in college, I mean literally the families have known each other, we were roommates in Arizona and so I think that one was just very, very easy.

  

  Sameer Nigam (Right) with Rahul Chari (Left)

• Sameer Nigam is the owner of the Mumbai Meteors, a volleyball team that plays in the RuPay Prime Volleyball League. In an interview, he talked about his love for volleyball and the scope of the league to take the sport to a higher level, and said,
  

  As a regular volleyball player myself, I have a great sense of how enthralling the sport can be. And the PVL gives us a perfect opportunity to build this sport in a professional way to a world-beating level.”

  

  Smaeer Nigam (Right) supporting his team Mumbai Meteors