Pine Labs-Owned Setu’s Cofounder Nikhil Kumar Steps Down

Fintech platform Setu’s cofounder Nikhil Kumar has stepped down from the day-to-day operations of the Pine Labs-owned platform after a nearly eight year long stint. 

Kumar made the announcement in a post on LinkedIn. There appears no clarity on what he plans to do next. 

“After many years of building Setu, it is time for me to step away from my everyday role. It is hard to put into words what Setu has meant to me. It has given me far more than I ever expected. It has been one of the most important chapters of my life,” read the LinkedIn post. 

An alumnus of Karnataka’s Visvesvaraya Technological University, Kumar previously cofounded customer feedback platform Voyce, which was later acquired by Exotel in 2015. Subsequently, he founded Setu along with Sahil Kini in 2018. 

Setu offers application programming interface (API) infrastructure for bill payments, UPI and KYC. Besides operating as a licensed account aggregator (AA), it also offers Sesame, which it claims is India’s first large language model (LLM) designed specifically for the banking and financial services (BFSI) sector.

Backed by names like Lightspeed, Falcon Edge, and Alpha Wave Global, the fintech startup has raised more than $18 Mn to date. The Bengaluru-based startup was acquired by listed fintech unicorn Pine Labs in 2022.

This comes nearly a year after the fintech startup Setu bulked up its leadership team and appointed a slew of new executives, including ex-Razorpay executive Prashanth Nimmagada as CTO and Vijeth Pandit as chief product officer. 

The development comes at an interesting time. A number of top executives and cofounders have been leaving marquee names to either float their own ventures or jump ship to other emerging ventures. 

Just yesterday, PhonePe-owned app marketplace Indus Appstore’s cofounder and CPO Akash Dongre stepped down from his role. Last month, Himanshu Ratnoo, who recently quit used car marketplace CARS24, joined electric bicycle startup EMotorad as a cofounder.

In May itself, B2B fashion supply chain startup Fashinza’s cofounder and CEO Pawan Gupta quit to pursue other opportunities in the AI space, while Fi Money cofounder Sumit Gwalani tendered his resignation amid financial challenges at the neobanking startup. 

In April, agritech startup Gramophone’s cofounder Navneet Singh Batra quit the startup to join fruit supply chain startup Superplum as the CBO. Meanwhile, boAt cofounder Aman Gupta’s latest venture OFF/BEAT recently raised ₹100 Cr in a seed funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

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