Chennai born Dhivya Suryadevara assumes top finance role at payments startup Stripe

Chennai born chartered accountant Dhivya Suryadevara has assumed the role of CFO at payment company Stripe. She quit her role as CFO at General Motors for this post.

After Kamala Harris, whose mother came from Chennai, became the vice president nominee of Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, Indian origin Suryadevara also has a southern connect. She was born and she studied there till she moved to the United States in 2001.

The Harvard educated Suryadevara spent more than a decade in General Motor Asset Management. Eventually she climbed to the top of the male dominated automobile industry becoming part of the only woman CEO-CFO combination at General Motors. She worked with Marry Barra, who is the current CEO at GM.

In a social media post, Stripe cofounder John Collison welcomed Suryadevara to Stripe as CFO. “…You may now begin your ‘well-oiled machine’ and ‘stepping on the gas’ type puns,” he said.

While speculation was rife that appointment of such a seasoned finance officer meant that Stripe, which was last valued at $36 billion, is set to hit the public markets soon, Collison rubbished such speculation.

“IPO considerations did not figure highly in our reasoning for this hire,” Collison was quoted by the Financial Times as saying. “We have no timeframe that we are working toward in terms of going public. It’s not a near-term thing on the cards for Stripe.”

So, who exactly is Suryadevara?

Chennai born Suryadevara’s Linkedin page suggests she has a master’s degree in finance from University of Madras, after which she travelled to the US to pursue her Master’s in Business Administration from Harvard University.

She worked at the World Bank as an intern, then at UBS Investment Bank for a year. From there she moved on to join automobile major General Motors, where she rose the ranks to become the CEO of its asset management arm and then moved onto parent company GM. She was the CFO at GM for almost two years before moving to the Valley.

In an interview to Real Simple, she said she lost her father at a young age and was brought up by her mother along with her two sisters. It is the struggle of her mother to support the entire family by herself, which inspired Suryadevara to work hard and earn her position in the world.

She shared in the interview how as a 22-year old at Harvard she had to struggle given that she was on student loans and had to find a job to pay it all back. She joined GM at the age of 25 and then never looked back.

While working with GM was obviously a challenge and with her family based in New York she was constantly on the move between Detroit and New York. Now having joined Stripe, she will have to commute between California and New York, one on the west coast and the other on the east coast of North America.

She joins Stripe at a crucial juncture when there is a strong buzz around the payments company going public. Stripe is backed by Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management and other marquee investors.

Stripe does have presence in India, but has not taken off in the highly competitive domestic payments market yet. Razorpay and Cashfree, both Y Combinator-backed companies, are its competitors here. Stripe offers all forms of digital payments be it pay outs for businesses, consumer transactions, online payments, offline payments and many others.