It has been a whirlwind of a time at BharatPe, with a whole sleuth of controversies miring the fintech start-up for months now. It all started when the co-founder, Madhuri Jain (Ashneer Grover’s wife) was forced to step down from the company after she was exposed siphoning company funds out of the company for her own personal use and even used them to fund family vacations to the USA and to the UAE.
Keeping it in the family, Mr. Ashneer Grover was also then caught partaking in some fraudulent activities although what he did has not been revealed to the public. He was then caught using abusive and informal languages during the heat of the moment during a meeting with employees of Kotak Mahindra Bank. This was after he was stripped off of his titles and stepped down as the managing director of the company he founded back in January.
During all of this, an employee of BharatPe came out to say in a LinkedIn post that many workers of the firm in various departments have yet to be receive their income for the month of March. Mr. Grover’s sister posted a comment on it and the chief executive officer of the start-up, Mr. Suhail Sameer sent a public reply to her stating that they have not been paid because her brother has siphoned all the money away. This comment went viral and Mr. Sameer has since apologized and announced that they have been doing their best to deliver the pay checks not only to the current employees but even the ones that have been fired.
Even with all of these problems going on, the start-up still managed to achieve record growth for the 2021 to 2022 financial year. Mr. Suhail Sameer, in an interview said that even with all of the internal problems, they will still continue to target to grow the business as much as they can as the main goal of the business to set themselves at the top of their industry in the long run. He went to say that their priority of the long run has paid off well even in the short run and they will continue to run operations keeping that in mind.
He even said that business shot up by 20% as they had a very successful opening quarter of 2022 as they grew in every aspect from new users, transactions, profits and so on.
It turns out that perhaps all types of publicity is good publicity.
