BharatPe’s Ashneer Grover on why he deleted his tweet

The audio clip had accused Grover of abusing and giving death threats to a

employee over margin funding for an initial public offering.

Grover tweeted on Thursday that
“some scamster” was trying to extort $240,000 in bitcoins from him using this clip.

On Saturday, Grover told ET that since the audio clip has been taken off Twitter and SoundCloud, he has deleted his tweet too. There was no point keeping the tweet anymore on his Twitter profile, he added.

In the tweet which has now been deleted, Grover had said, “Folks. Chill! It’s a FAKE audio by some scamster trying to extort funds ($240K in bitcoins). I refused to buckle. I’ve got more character. And Internet has got enough scamsters:).”

On Wednesday evening, an anonymous handle on Twitter, called ‘bongo babu’, had put up a Soundcloud link to an audio clip that was allegedly of an argument involving Grover, his wife and an employee of Kotak Mahindra Bank, where Grover allegedly hurled expletives for missing out on a margin funding for Nykaa’s IPO. The audio clip has not been independently verified by ET.

Margin funding, also known as IPO financing, is essentially a short-term loan provided by certain lenders and brokers to high net-worth individuals.

Last year, Grover had said he was planning to invest in India’s new brigade of technology and startup IPOs through Kotak Mahindra Bank. He had put in a personal application of around Rs 105 crore in the Zomato IPO, Grover said in an interview with CNBC TV-18.

The BharatPe cofounder has been on the receiving end of criticism from certain portions of the Indian startup ecosystem, after his remarks on the Shark Tank India reality show, where he is one of the panellists doling out personal investments.

In a story last year, explaining how BharatPe
partnered 44-year-old NBFC Centrum Finance to acquire a banking licence, ETtech had said, citing sources, that the company’s investors were not comfortable with Grover’s “mercurial style” of leadership.

By August 2021, Grover became managing director at BharatPe, with recent hire Suhail Sameer taking on the role of chief executive.

Grover and BharatPe have also been embroiled in a public spat and legal battle on the ‘Pe’ suffix with rival PhonePe, owned by Flipkart.

BharatPe has been one of the well-funded fintechs in the Indian startup ecosystem and has recently
raised $370 million as a part of its latest fundraise led by New York-based Tiger Global. The deal almost tripled its valuation to $2.85 billion.

The three-year-old New Delhi-based startup, which recently partnered with Centrum to take over the troubled PMC Bank, has been actively looking to double down on an active consumer lending play through PostPe.

The company now is looking to monetise further through consumer products with the acquisition of loyalty-based payment platform PayBack India and the launch of peer-to-peer lending platform 12% Club.