Shashvat Nakrani

Shashvat Nakrani grew up in Bhavnagar, Gujarat, in a family of educators before attending the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi to study Textile Technology. His background in rigorous technical problem-solving at IIT, combined with his keen observation of the friction in local retail environments, gave him the precise analytical framework needed to conceptualize and engineer BharatPe's incredibly disruptive, interoperable UPI payment architecture.

Shashvat Nakrani is an Indian entrepreneur and the original co-founder of the fintech unicorn BharatPe. While studying at IIT Delhi in 2018, the 19-year-old Nakrani recognized a massive gap in the Indian digital payments market: small merchants lacked a simple, unified way to accept payments from various UPI apps without paying exorbitant fees. He dropped out of college to launch BharatPe alongside Bhavik Koladiya and later Ashneer Grover. Nakrani's vision of a single, interoperable QR code completely revolutionized Indian merchant payments, driving the company's explosive growth into lending and financial services. By age 23, his massive success with BharatPe made him one of the youngest self-made individuals on the IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List.