BharatPe appoints Ex Walmart Labs Ankur Jain as its Chief Product Officer

Ankur Jain in his new role to lead product transformation and drive innovation that cuts across business units and geographic boundaries.

BharatPe, India’s leading merchant payment, and lending network company, has strengthened its leadership team by appointing Mr. Ankur Jain as Chief Product Officer. Ankur will be responsible for the complete product lifecycle and innovation at BharatPe. Ankur is the fifth CXO at BharatPe and joins Vijay Agarwal (CTO), Nishit Sharma (Chief Revenue Officer), Puneet Agarwal (Chief Risk Officer), and Nishant Jain (Chief Business Officer) in the core team.

Heading product management and user experience across customer touch points, Ankur will contribute to BharatPe’s aggressive plans to scale up its footprint to 10 million merchants this year. Ankur, an alumnus of Stanford University has a rich experience of working in deep technology startups like Kosmix and Instalocate and the world’s largest company Walmart. He has developed large scale products which have been used by millions of people across the globe driving huge revenues for the organizations. He was part of the founding team to set up Walmart Labs office in India and has substantial experience of building cross functional teams in business, technology and product verticals across the globe.

Ashneer Grover, co-founder & CEO, BharatPe said, “We are at an interesting point in our growth phase that requires constant innovation and fast delivery of products for the rapidly evolving digital and financial needs of Indian shopkeepers. We are methodically getting the right people in the right positions to meet these requirements. Talent will be our biggest differentiator.”

“I have deep respect for talent that has worked in the US – the vision with and scale at which professionals who have come back from US operate is commendable. Ankur joining in a critical role will strengthen our core team, he has deep experience in accelerating revenue through new products and solutions, driving large-scale organizational change, and anticipating market dynamics to create new products and segments which will help us drive product innovation at a higher velocity,” Ashneer added.

Prior to BharatPe, Ankur was CEO and co-founder of Instalocate. The mission of Instalocate is to bring the fintech revolution to the travel industry through an AI powered travel assistant and convert travel disruptions into instant money. Prior to Instalocate, he worked at Walmart Labs as Senior Director of Product Management where he developed Artificial Intelligence (AI) based products to help merchants in understanding the customer pulse, to decide which products to sell and to set the right price.

Ankur joined Walmart Labs as part of the acquisition of Kosmix by Walmart in 2011. Ankur was the early employee of Kosmix and saw the full product life cycle from initial days to a successful acquisition. At Kosmix, he led the product and growth teams and scaled the user base to hundreds of millions of users. He has deep research experience at some of the prestigious labs in the world including MIT Media Lab, Stanford Technology Ventures, Ericsson Eurolab and Institute for Infocom Research.