BharatPe Hires Ex-Paytm SVP Ajit Kumar As CTO To Steady Tech Ahead Of IPO

BharatPe has named Ajit Kumar — a near-decade Paytm engineering veteran — as its new chief technology officer. The appointment comes five months after former CTO Pankaj Goel left the company citing “personal reasons.” BharatPe says Kumar will “be spearheading the startup’s tech strategy and innovations across its payments and lending platforms.” The move follows a period of leadership churn and an internal realignment as the fintech prepares for an eventual public listing.

BharatPe is openly positioning itself for an IPO by FY27 and has discussed EBITDA and profitability targets in public briefings. In that context, filling the CTO role with a leader experienced in large-scale payments systems is a signal to markets: tech stability and operational governance are now explicit priorities.

A credible CTO matters for investors not only because of product roadmaps but also because engineering maturity underpins auditability, regulatory compliance, incident management, and predictable operating metrics. For a fintech with merchant-facing hardware and credit products, those are material factors for public-market readiness.

What Ajit Kumar brings from Paytm: 

Ajit Kumar spent nearly nine years at Paytm, joining as a general manager in 2017 and rising to senior vice president of engineering. He is an IIT-Guwahati alumnus and has prior stints at Snapdeal, Times Internet, and xAd Inc. BharatPe’s statement highlighted his domain experience: “His proven experience in building scalable fintech platforms and his deep understanding of payments and UPI infrastructure will be instrumental as we continue to innovate and strengthen our technology stack,” said Nalin Negi, CEO, BharatPe.

At Paytm, Kumar worked on high-throughput payment flows, wallet and UPI integrations, and backend engineering that supports consumer and merchant use cases. Those operational capabilities are directly relevant for BharatPe’s mix of point-of-sale devices, payment rails, and lending products.

BharatPe had several senior exits this year. Former CTO Pankaj Goel left citing “personal reasons” and later joined LeadSquared as CTO in June 2025. The company also saw departures among marketing, HR, and data leadership: CMO Parth Joshi stepped down to pursue entrepreneurial ventures, while CHRO Smriti Handa and chief data scientist Ritesh Mohan Srivastava moved on.

The board responded with a structured realignment: CBO Sandeep Indurkar now leads the banking vertical and serves as the CEO of the payments vertical; Kohinoor Biswas oversees the consumer business; and Rijish Raghavan manages the PoS device business. These leaders report directly to CEO Nalin Negi. Bringing Ajit Kumar into the CTO slot is the next step to restore a stable leadership bench and codify cross-vertical engineering coordination.

Ajit Kumar’s appointment is as much a business signal as an operational hire. For BharatPe, the move ties technology leadership to the company’s IPO narrative: it reflects an attempt to convert recent organisational turbulence into executional stability. The next chapters will show whether the new tech leadership can deliver measurable reliability gains, faster product rollouts, and the governance posture investors expect from a public company.