Setu ropes in former Razorpay executives as CTO, CPO; bolsters top deck with new hires

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API infrastructure platform Setu, a Pine Labs company, has strengthened its leadership team with a series of senior appointments from fintech majors including Razorpay, PhonePe, and Wibmo, as it gears up for its next phase of growth, the firm said on July 25.

Former Vice President of Engineering at Razorpay, Prashanth Nimmagada, has joined as Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Nimmagada, who worked at the fintech firm for over 5 years, had previous stints at LinkedIn and Microsoft in the US.

Joining in July as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) is Ramkumar Thirumurthi, who previously led Razorpay’s neobanking vertical and co-founded the fintech startup Actyv.ai.

Earlier in January, Setu had also roped another Razorpay executive Vijeth Pandit as Chief Product Officer (CPO). The former senior director of product management at Razorpay spent nearly three years at the firm before joining Setu and worked on scaling its core payments portfolio.

Setu further appointed Nikhil Ratanpal as Director of Product Development in June. An alumnus of ISB, Ratanpal was formerly leading PhonePe’s payment gateway business, while Santosh Subramanian (prior leadership experience at Yes Bank and PayU-owned Wibmo) joined as Head of Finance in May this year.

"The expanded leadership team is expected to drive growth and deepen partnerships with banks, fintechs, and enterprises building on India’s digital public infrastructure," the firm said in a statement.

The top deck hires follow the appointment of Setu's new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Anand Raisinghani earlier this year. Raisinghani, who formerly led SAP India’s enterprise business, took over from Setu co-founder Sahil Kini, who now serves as CEO of the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub.

Founded in 2018 by Nikhil Kumar and Kini, Setu is an application programming interface (API) infrastructure provider that offers services across bill payments, savings, credit and payments. The Reserve Bank of India has given the company the licence to operate as an account aggregator.

The Bengaluru-based firm, which was acquired by payments service provider Pine Labs for around $70 million in 2022, works closely with banks, insurance companies, lending firms, AMCs other financial institutions for the financial architecture integrations.