Pine Lab's Setu Bulks Up Leadership, Ropes In Ex-Razorpay Executive As CTO

Bengaluru-based fintech startup Setu, owned by digital payments major Pine Labs, has strengthened its leadership team with a host of appointments from fintech majors, including Razorpay, PhonePe and Wibmo.

As part of its ongoing efforts to scale its API-led financial services, the company has appointed Prashanth Nimmagada as chief technology officer (CTO). Nimmagada previously served as vice president of Engineering at Razorpay and has also held senior roles at global tech giants such as LinkedIn and Microsoft.

Earlier in January, Pine Labs appointed Vijeth Pandit as chief product officer. Pandit brings nearly three years of experience from Razorpay, where he served as senior director of Product Management. Another key addition is Ramkumar Thirumurthi, former head of Razorpay’s neobanking vertical and cofounder of Actyv.ai, who has joined as chief revenue officer.

In June, Setu appointed Nikhil Ratanpal, former product lead for PhonePe’s payment gateway business, as director of Product Development. The company also brought on board Santosh Subramanian as head of Finance. Subramanian has previously worked with Yes Bank and PayU-owned Wibmo.

These appointments also follow Anand Raisinghani taking over as CEO earlier this year. Raisinghani, previously held senior leadership roles at SAP India and succeeded Setu cofounder Sahil Kini.

Founded in 2018 by Sahil Kini and Nikhil Kumar, Setu is an application programming interface (API) infrastructure provider that offers services across bill payments, savings, credit and payments. The Bengaluru-based startup was acquired by fintech Unicorn Pine Labs in 2022.

Setu provides API infrastructure for bill payments, UPI, KYC, and digital signatures, and operates as a licensed Account Aggregator (AA) under the Reserve Bank of India. With its expanded leadership team, Setu, under Pine Labs’ ownership, is focussing on its growth strategy while continuing to support banks, fintechs, and enterprises in developing digital financial solutions for India’s API-driven financial ecosystem.

The startup counts Lightspeed, Falcon Edge, and Alpha Wave Global among its key investors.

Setu’s AI Push

The startup also entered the generative AI space in May 2024 with the launch of Sesame, which it claimed was India’s first large language model (LLM) designed specifically for the banking and financial services (BFSI) sector.

Developed in collaboration with AI startup SarvamAI, Sesame was trained on custom local data and aimed at improving key financial operations such as credit underwriting, fraud detection, loan monitoring, and personal finance advisory,Inc42 reported in May 2024.

Setu said the LLM leveraged internal company data and could help enterprises significantly enhance the accuracy of insights drawn from financial statements.

The development came at a time when generative AI is seeing rapid adoption across the sector. With this, Setu became one of the latest homegrown fintech startup to join the AI wave. From personalising financial experiences to simplifying customer support processes for banks and other financial institutions, the technology was being adopted at pace.

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