‘Biggest failure in India’: Bharat Pe’s co-founder Ashneer Grover on WhatsApp Pay

Ashneer Grover, former Managing Director and co-founder of Bharat Pe and Shark Tank season 1 judge, on Wednesday, slammed WhatsApp Pay as India’s biggest failure as a tech product.

WhatsApp is widely used as a messaging app in the country and offers convenience for users to send money on the platform by using UPI. Grover called the app’s payment as easy as sending images, however, failed to capture the mass users.

Grover, in a tweet, said, “WhatsApp Pay has to be the biggest failure in India as a tech product. Everyone has @WhatsApp on their phone – sending money on WA using UPI is as easy as sending pic.”

Grover further added that the Meta-owned platform should have beaten other UPI-enabled Payment apps like Paytm, PhonePe and GooglePay. He said, “It should have beaten @Paytm @PhonePe @GooglePay. Country managers can’t win you markets – good riddance now !”

Grover, in another tweet, shared a screenshot of WhatsApp’s advertisement in a thread of tweets and criticised the organisation’s managers for publishing useless ads. He said that the company should have invested in improving the payment services instead of posting the ad about its safety features.

His post reads, “Yeh ad hi dekh lo – iska kya acahar daalega koi customer – itni ad WhatsApp Pay ki kar lete instead. Public policy uncle aur vakil babu dhanda chalayenge to aisa hi hoga.” [If lawyers and public policy uncle run WhatsApp’s Business, this is unavoidable.]

However, several Twitter users didn’t support Grover narrative and said that it’s not WhatsApp’s primary business model and hence, it didn’t focus primarily on the UPI payment business.

One Twitter user wrote, “They came late and haven’t done anything new. Not only WhatsApp Pay, even Amazon UPI Pay is also failure. The reason for this is that Payment & Finance is not their primary business.”

Another user replied, “Not their focus area for business model. Simple. They are already generating revenue from WhatsApp business.”

Many Twitter users also began questioning Grover’s own Bharat Pe app and asked why it has been beaten by WhatsApp Pay. Grover replied that Bharat Pe doesn’t do consumer payments – it’s a merchant service.

Grover has previously been associated with unicorns such as Bharat Pe and Grofers in leadership roles. He was also among the popular sharks on Shark Tank India but is not featured in the next season. Amit Jain, CEO and co-founder of CarDekho, replaced him.