How 23-year-old Shashvat Nakrani made it to Hurun India Rich List

Shashvat Nakrani, the 23-year-old who founded the payment app BharatPe when he was in college, is the youngest person to feature in the IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List.

This IIT dropout is among the 13 individuals on the list who were born in the 90s and they are all considered self-made individuals by the listing entity.

Nakrani co-founded BharatPe payment app in 2018 along with Ashneer Grover. During his third year of college, Nakrani identified a large gap in the market, the presence of a payment gateway that was accessible to merchants that did not cut into their margins. He went on to figure out a solution that would help these merchants by leveraging the Unified Payments Interface’s (UPI) star feature – interoperability. His solution was unique as it allowed merchants to use just one QR code that would be used to conduct transactions for any other payment app as well. BharatPe offers merchants a single QR code to accept all payment apps such as PayTm, PhonePe, Google Pay, BHIM and 150+ other UPI apps.

This year, India has 179 more super-rich people and the number of such individuals has crossed the 1,000-mark. Mukesh Ambani, Reliance Industries chairman, has retained the top position as the richest Indian once again, according to the Hurun India Rich List 2021 published on Thursday. Both the Adani brothers have stormed up to the top 10 positions for the first time ever.

Hurun India Rich List is a ranking of individuals with a net worth of over ₹1,000 crore and has grown to become the most comprehensive rich list in the country. Over the last decade, the list grew from 100 individuals from 10 cities to 1,007 richest Indians from 76 cities. The number of women on the list is 47 this year, up from five a decade ago. The youngest richest Indian 10 years ago was 37 years old and this time he is 23. Also, the software and services sector is third on the list, up from the fifth spot 10 years ago.