UPASANA TAKU

The 8th day of Navratri belongs to Goddess Mahagauri. She symbolises

inner peace, intelligence, and optimism. Our story today also features
a woman who lives up to such qualities. It is the story of Upasana Taku,
Founder at Zaakpay and Co-Founder at MobiKwik.
Upasana finished her Bachelors of Engineering from NIT, Jalandhar.
Her interest in pursuing Masters in Management Science took her to
Stanford University. She possesses a commendable experience of over
13 years in Payments & Financial Services. And as an entrepreneur her
journey spans over 7 years. But then, this is not an ordinary one. Let
us take a stab at her story till day with an experience of handling a
small team of early employees to expanding it to 250.
Upasana is now the leading force and face at MobiKwik, responsible
to hold things together. She is the one powerhouse at Mobikwik who
keeps such a large team focused. And her efforts, blended with the
team’s cooperation have yielded her enormous success to an extent
that Mobikwik now stands as India’s largest independent mobile
payments network.
Till 2008, she was occupied with PayPal only to make a choice of
getting back to India. She had her instinct pointing in an altogether
different direction of starting her own business. The corporate life and
comfort zone was not something that she was looking for. The hunger
to face challenges and making a significant contribution to the lives of
people pulled her back to India. The easiness of work and
dissatisfaction in working for big, high-impact projects worth millions
of dollars pushed her to achieve something extraordinary. There was
a certain thriving to come back to India and contributing to Indian
startup ecosystem was in her mind. And this played a crucial role in
changing her career tracks. And this is when she came back and
founded Zaakpay
In 2003, the Lakshmi Niwas Mittal and Usha Mittal Foundation and
the Government of Rajasthan partnered together to establish a
university, the LNM Institute of Information Technology (LNMIIT)
in Jaipur as an autonomous non-profit organisation.
In 2009, the Foundation along with Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan founded
the Usha Lakshmi Mittal Institute of Management in New Delhi.
SNDT Women's University renamed the Institute of Technology for
Women (ITW) as Usha Mittal Institute of Technology after a large
donation from the Lakshmi Niwas Mittal Foundation.
He completed his Primary and Secondary school from Shri Daulatram
Nopany Vidyalaya formerly known as Nopany High.
One of the major difficulties she faced was of her gender. Managing
finance at MobiKwik, she was once by a CA and a potential investor
over a phone to hand over a call to man. She observes that accepting
woman at such a dominating is unsettling. And this is why she talks
about courage that a woman has to take when in the helm of affairs.
For that incident, she quickly breaks the ice and made the other
person comfortable.