Prakash Sikaria joined Flipkart in 2014 as a consultant, planning to stay for six months. He stayed for eight years. Flipkart was still operating out of scattered offices in Bengaluru then, long before its sprawling headquarters came up. What caught his attention was not the office but the culture. Problems were broken down into numbers and solved analytically rather than debated endlessly.
“It felt like you’re talking to like-minded people,” he says. That approach kept him there and, over time, made him someone to whom CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy repeatedly turned when a new competitive challenge emerged. As Amazon built an advertising business, Sikaria helped create Flipkart Ads. As loyalty became critical, he launched Supercoins and Flipkart Ultra. When Meesho gained ground in smaller towns, he built Shopsy to target the same segment. He also led the acquisition of Cleartrip. By 2021, Flipkart had consolidated customer, marketing, growth and new businesses under one organisation and Sikaria was asked to lead it. “Every two years I was building a new business,” he says.
Building businesses, rather than managing them, had always been his instinct. After studying chemical engineering at IIT Kanpur, Sikaria worked at Schlumberger, completed an MBA at Kellogg and joined Barclays’ investment banking business in New York. The career looked successful, but he missed the satisfaction of creating products. He returned to India in 2012 and founded Sharedcab, a ride-sharing startup backed by Kae Capital and Blume Ventures. The venture eventually shut down as Ola’s rapid expansion squeezed the supply of cars available to smaller operators. Sikaria chose not to sell the company. “I was always an operator. You want to keep building,” he says.
By 2022, he had decided it was time to leave Flipkart and become an entrepreneur again. Instead, Krishnamurthy persuaded him to build his next venture inside the Flipkart group. The trigger was PhonePe’s separation from Flipkart, which left the group without a payments business. Conversations with Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal, who had already bet on financial services through Navi, reinforced Sikaria’s view that fintech would be one of India’s biggest opportunities over the next decade. “I said this makes sense. I will also do financial service,” he recalls.
That became the starting point for super.money, launched in 2024. Rather than positioning itself as another UPI app chasing payment volumes, the company is trying to build a broader financial services platform where payments become the entry point for credit, deposits and commerce. It already offers personal loans, fixed deposits and secured credit cards, while commerce through its splitStore platform and stockbroking are under development.
Sikaria believes arriving late has actually been an advantage because the first generation of UPI companies focused almost entirely on acquiring users before figuring out how to make money. “Because we are coming late to the party, we are not making the mistakes everyone made,” he says. “Be it our credit card, personal loan or FD, we launched them right from the first year.” The strategy is to monetise from the outset instead of depending indefinitely on cashback and incentives.
The model has scaled quickly. Flipkart Group has invested about $50 million in super.money at a reported valuation of around $1 billion. In a little over a year, monthly UPI transactions have risen from about 2.5 million to more than 440 million. The app now serves around 10 million monthly active users, more than 75% of whom are below the age of 30, and users open the app roughly 30 times a month.
According to NPCI data, super.money became India’s fifth-largest UPI app in May with a market share of about 1.8%. Its rise has coincided with the gradual loosening of the UPI duopoly. PhonePe and Google Pay together accounted for about 86% of transactions in May 2024. By May this year, their combined share had dropped below 80% for the first time, creating space for challengers such as Navi and super.money. Beyond payments, the company now disburses more than `1,000 crore of personal loans every month through partners including Axis Bank, SMFG India Credit, Utkarsh Small Finance Bank and Kotak811, and has issued more than 100,000 secured credit cards.
The challenge now is less about growth and more about proving that the business can generate sustainable profits. Sikaria expects credit to eventually contribute about 60% of revenue, with payments accounting for around 20% and commerce making up the balance. Yet he is resisting the temptation to become an all-purpose financial supermarket. “The temptation is to keep adding everything. We want to do fewer things but do them well,” he says. The immediate target is to reach a $100 million annual revenue run rate by the end of 2026 and become Ebitda profitable by December 2027, with revenues of $200-300 million by then.
For someone who spent nearly a decade building businesses inside Flipkart, super.money is his first opportunity to test whether the playbook that worked within a large company can also create a successful standalone business.