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    ET Startup Awards 2021: ZestMoney’s Lizzie Chapman wins the Woman Ahead award

    Synopsis

    In 2015, amid a funding frenzy in the startup ecosystem locally, Lizzie Chapman founded ZestMoney with former colleagues from Wonga, to make digital goods and services accessible to the masses.

    Winners Slides_ET Startup awards-2021_ETTECH5ET Tech
    In the end, it all boiled down to Lizzie Chapman’s perseverance. The ETSA jury highlighted this as one of her most significant attributes in a highly competitive financial services industry.

    Chapman pipped Sugar Cosmetics chief executive Vineeta Singh to emerge as the winner in the Woman Ahead category.

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    The elite jury, which discussed various parameters before picking Chapman, also acknowledged how Singh, a close contender for the top spot, had been building ventures in the beauty space—earlier with FabBag—before hitting it big with Sugar Cosmetics, a brand designed for Indian women.

    “Almost 10 years ago, we saw that Indian consumers would love a product that had the lowest costs and was the easiest to use. We were probably a tiny bit too early, but the observations we had then that BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) was going to be much needed in the Indian ecosystem has finally become very obvious,” Chapman said.

    ZestMoney recently raised $50 million in its Series C funding round, from global BNPL provider Zip Co Ltd.

    Chapman’s journey in financial services goes back to 2011 when she was the India head of UK-based BNPL player Wonga.

    In 2015, amid a funding frenzy in the startup ecosystem locally, she founded ZestMoney with former colleagues from Wonga, to make digital goods and services accessible to the masses.

    The platform is a three-way marketplace - for consumers, for merchants, to whom it offers payment solutions, and lenders, for which it is a software and acquisition partner.

    The company has partnered with point-of-sale platforms to make its BNPL solutions available across 75,000 offline stores, in addition to its 10,000 online partners.

    About 70% of its customers are from tier II and tier III cities and most are new to credit or have only limited credit exposure.

    In the next year, the company plans to take its offline network to 400,000 stores.

    “ZestMoney has built something unique which I personally haven't seen anywhere else. Also, it’s scaled not just online, but also offline in partnership with point-of-sale. By essentially competing and winning in this competitive category, Chapman and ZestMoney deserve to get the award,” said jury member Gokul Rajaram, the product and business leader at US-based food delivery platform DoorDash.

    While inclusivity of women in the tech world is a challenge globally, spotlighting their work inspires the next generation of women to “reach for the stars,” Chapman said.

    “One amazing thing that happened just from being nominated was that so many young women reached out. I'm meeting a few women to help them with fundraising and other things,” she added.

    Also Read: Buy Now Pay Later is the flavour of festive season for top Internet firms

    Other Contenders

    Sugar Cosmetics | Vineeta Singh
    Vineeta SinghET Tech

    Singh cofounded Sugar with her husband Kaushik Mukherjee, which in its initial years faced challenges in raising funds. That started to change when direct-to-consumer brands began seeing heightened investor interest. Sugar has raised $21 million this year, in a round led by Elevation Capital.

    Atlan | Prukalpa Sankar
    Prukalpa SankarET Tech

    Sankar developed the core product of her current venture Atlan, a data-ops company, as an internal tool for her previous venture, SocialCops. The product is a data collaboration software that exists as a layer on top of data warehouses, which has received traction at an early stage, allowing Atlan to raise $16 million in May this year.

    Wysa | Jo Aggarwal
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    Aggarwal founded the AI-powered mental health app after she couldn’t find a product to help cope with depression following the failure of a previous startup, which did not find a product-market fit. Wysa is one of the few well-funded businesses in the mental wellness space in India.

    10club | Bhavna Suresh
    Bhavna SureshET Tech

    Earlier this year, Suresh’s startup 10club raised $40 million, the largest ever seed round in India, to enter the buzzing roll-up space. 10club acquires e-commerce product sellers with an intent to operate and grow the businesses. Before she founded 10club, Suresh had sold an online real estate platform that she helped build.
    The Economic Times

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