Former Grofers vice president Vijay Aggarwal joins Bharatpe as CTO

Two weeks after Resilient Innovations, the parent holding of BharatPe, raised $75 million in a Series C round, the QR code-based payment app provider found its first chief technology officer in Vijay Aggarwal, a former vice president at online grocery delivery platform Grofers.

The New Delhi-based company aims to aggressively expand its business in the current calendar year, a statement announcing the appointment said.

“Vijay brings in the required expertise and network to build a world class tech team at BharatPe to help us scale 10X from here… He will build and lead our upcoming tech hub in Delhi," Ashneer Grover, co-founder and CEO at BharatPe, said.

In January, the company unveiled a technology hub in Delhi to house its expanded products and technology team. It had also mentioned its plan to hire over 75 engineers and product managers in 2020 and expand its technology team three-fold.

An IIT Roorkee alumnus, Aggarwal’s last career role was with Singapore-based digital wealth management platform Syfe, where he headed the company’s engineering operations out of Gurugram, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Prior to Syfe, where he was also a founding member, Aggarwal was Gurugram-based Grofer’ vice president of technology. Some of his other leadership roles, in a span of 13 years of corporate experience, were at Bharti SoftBank and Ibibo. Aggarwal brings a skill set and experience that cuts across domains including telecom, gaming, social networking, software-as-a-service (SaaS), travel, ecommerce and finance, the statement added.

This development is BharatPe’s second leadership appointment this year. In January, it roped in former Paytm and Airtel Payments Bank executive Dhruv Bahl as its head of operations. In his new role, Bahl is responsible for the overall operations across merchant acquisitions, servicing, payments, lending, and commerce.

Founded by Grover and Shashvat Nakrani in 2018, BharatPe currently serves over 30 lakh merchants in India. It claims to have grown its business by 30 times in 2019.

Read: PhonePe, BharatPe fight over ‘Pe’

The fintech platform processes over 40 million unified payments interface (UPI) transactions a month. It has disbursed more than 17,500 loans in the past four months and is on target to disburse Rs 250 crore of loans by March 2020.

Recent CIO and CTO appointments

In February, subscription-based video-on-demand platform ALTBalaji, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Balaji Telefilms, appointed Shahabuddin Shaikh as its CTO; Flipkart-owned fashion etailer Myntra appointed former Samsung, Goldman Sachs, Citibank and Yahoo executive Raghu Krishnananda as its CTO; and Mumbai-based Sony Pictures Network India appointed former IBM, Oracle executive Raj Mohan Srinivasan as the CIO for its network.

In January, chipmaker Intel appointed former Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Baker Hughes CIO Archana Deskus as its CIO; robotics process automation software firm Automation Anywhere appointed Yousuf Khan as its first CIO; finance management solutions company Financial Software and Systems (FSS) appointed former Hitachi Payments CTO Sankarnarayan Lakshmanan as its CIO.