Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma's brother elevated as Chief Business Officer ahead of its IPO

• A quick search on LinkedIn revealed that Ajay Shekhar Sharma has been the CBO at Paytm since August 2021.
• He started off his journey as a manager of sales and served as senior vice president before being promoted last month.
• Paytm is looking to raise $2.2 billion through its IPO, reportedly at a valuation of $25-30 billion.

Ajay Shekhar Sharma, brother of Paytm’s founder and chief executive (CEO) Vijay Shekhar Sharma, has been promoted as the chief business officer of the digital payments giant ahead of its $2.2 billion initial public offering (IPO).

As per his LinkedIn profile, Ajay Shekhar Sharma has been the chief business officer of marketing cloud business at Paytm since August this year. Paytm’s cloud business offers cloud services to telecom companies and enterprises.

He has been associated with Paytm for over a decade. He started off his journey as a manager of sales and served as senior vice president before being promoted last month.

In the preliminary paperwork for Paytm’s $2.2 billion IPO, Ajay Shekhar Sharma was mentioned as a relative of Vijay Shekhar Sharma, who owned interest in the voting power of the company. This gave him “control” and “significant influence” in the company.

The development was first reported by Moneycontrol.

Paytm’s parent company One 97 Communications ⁠— which started 21 years ago as a payments company and then went to add a payments bank, trading platform, online retail and games to its business ⁠— is looking to raise $2.2 billion through its IPO, reportedly at a valuation of $25-30 billion.

About half of this money will be raised through fresh issue while the rest will be a secondary issue that will offer partial exits to some of Paytm’s investors.

The Noida-based company reported a consolidated revenue of ₹3,186.8 crore in the fiscal year that ended in March 2021. This was nearly a ₹353 crore reduction from the revenue reported in FY2020. Paytm also cut its losses to ₹1,701 crore in FY2021, compared to ₹2942 crore reported in FY2020.

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