About Gautam
Gautam Ivatury is a serial entrepreneur in digital finance and financial inclusion. After being the first CFO at SKS Microfinance (IPO in 2010, now BFIL), Gautam joined CGAP where he established and ran the Gates Foundation-funded CGAP Technology Program for digital finance until 2008. Gautam then co-founded Signal Point Partners, which incubated JipangeKusave — Kenya’s first credit/savings product on M-Pesa and the precursor to M-Shwari — as well as M-Kopa Solar in Kenya and MeraDoctor in India. Gautam is co-founder and Head of Product at ArthImpact, and co-founder and Chairperson of MeraDoctor/Paycillin (both in India). He is also a Director and investor in fintech startups including Vaya Finserv (one of India’s fastest-growing micro-lenders), a senior advisor to Encourage Capital, and was formerly senior advisor to Accion Venture Lab and the MIX and chairperson of the GSM Association’s MMU Fund.
Recent experience
From 2011–2016 I was co-founder and full-time Chairman at MeraDoctor, a VC-funded digital health startup in India that has enabled over 300,000 e-consultations between patients and doctors via chat and voice. We’ve served patients from over 1,000 cities and towns across India, learned many many lessons about serving rural and urban markets, and built a large trove of secure, digital health data (in the form of 8+ million messages between patients and doctors).
Startups
Including MeraDoctor, I’ve managed or helped start five ventures (in India, Bangladesh and Kenya), including SKS Microfinance (which went public in 2010 and is now called BFIL) and JipangeKusave in Kenya (the first purely digital loans/savings product on M-PESA).
Industry-building
From 2006–2008 I set up and ran CGAP’s $26 million Gates-funded technology program and also served as Chairperson of the GSMA Mobile Money for the Unbanked fund (from 2009–2011). Through these roles I was involved in shaping projects, research and regulation, and making grants of $20+ million in total to dozens of startups, banks and telecom operators. I’ve also been an Advisory Board member for the Microfinance Information eXchange (MIX) and Accion’s Venture Lab fund.
Strategy and product design
At Signal Point Partners, which I co-founded in 2009, I consulted to global firms such as Microsoft, IBM, VISA, Safaricom and Orascom on emerging market mobile strategy. In all, I’ve conducted customer and product research, provided regulatory inputs, designed industry level infrastructure, or consulted to market leaders in-country in nine countries from Brazil to Bangladesh.
Publications
Research, thought pieces and book chapters I’ve written have been featured in publications from the World Bank, CGAP, GSM Association, MIT’s Innovations Journal, The Banker, and academic texts from Springer Verlag.
