He didn't come from payments. That was the point.
In 2013, Prajit Nanu was trying to organize a bachelor party at a Phuket resort for a friend. He needed to wire INR 40,000 - roughly $640 - to book the venue. His bank asked for more documentation than a mortgage application, then charged fees that made the transaction barely viable. He ended up routing the money through a friend's account instead. That friend got hit with even steeper hidden charges. The whole thing was absurd.
Nanu was not a payments veteran. He had spent his career in sales and business process outsourcing - Agilisys India, Adventity, Capita Plc, WNS Global Services, then TMF Group. He understood enterprise sales cycles, client relationships, and global operations. He did not understand why sending $640 across borders required bureaucratic theater. That gap in understanding turned out to be the most valuable thing he could bring to fintech.
In 2014, he and co-founder Michael Bermingham - who brought deep compliance expertise - started building in a Singapore apartment. They launched InstaReM in 2015, a consumer remittance platform whose name compressed "instant" and "remittance." The platform offered transparent, real-time exchange rates with minimal friction. In a market where banks were making billions on spread and hidden fees, InstaReM grew to process up to $4 billion annually across 55 countries.
"A lot of people whom I spoke to back in 2014-2015, now when we meet, they say: Prajit, one reason why Nium is doing well is because you didn't come from payments. Because if you had come from payments, you would have thought about all the glass ceilings that exist in the world of payments."- Prajit Nanu
The pivot came in 2016. Nanu began to see something bigger: the businesses using InstaReM for their own payroll and supplier payments needed infrastructure, not just a consumer app. By 2019 they had rebranded the parent company to Nium - derived from the Sanskrit word "neeyam," meaning "rules," a nod to rewriting them. InstaReM continued as the consumer face; Nium became the enterprise engine.
The bet was on becoming payments infrastructure. Not a pretty app, not a challenger bank - the rails that banks, airlines, travel platforms, and digital marketplaces plug into when they need to move money anywhere in the world, right now. By 2021, that bet hit unicorn status with a $200 million Series D at over $1 billion valuation.
Building Nium required licensing in eleven global jurisdictions, setting up operations in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the UK, and the US. It meant acquiring Ixaris, a UK-based virtual card company, and Wirecard Forex India. It meant surviving the early days of COVID-19 when investors pulled term sheets mid-close - and being pulled through by Vertex Ventures' continued confidence when others ran for the exits.
Focus became the engine of growth. By 2022 Nium narrowed from a sprawling set of use cases to three lines of business - banks and fintechs, travel companies, and digital platforms - plus seven specific use cases within those verticals. Net revenue grew from approximately $31 million in 2021 to over $80 million in 2022, and the company projected $160-180 million in 2023 revenues while approaching profitability. Nium earned a spot on the Forbes Fintech 50 list twice, CB Insights' Fintech 250 three times, and the Financial Times High-Growth Companies list every year it qualified.
In June 2024, Nium raised $50 million in a Series E led by Brunei Investment Agency. The valuation came in at $1.4 billion - a 30% haircut from the $2.1 billion peak of 2022. Nanu was candid: "Being realistic, when we raised in early 2022, public markets were killing it. The public markets have not been kind to fintech." The down round was real, the company's fundamentals were not going backward.
The IPO timeline has moved. A 2025 US listing became late 2026. Nanu has been building the leadership bench: in February 2026, Nium appointed a new CTO, Chief Risk and Compliance Officer, and Chief Marketing Officer. The infrastructure of a public company takes shape before the S-1, not after. Meanwhile Nium participated in Visa's stablecoin settlement pilot in November 2025, enabling USDC-based settlement on supported blockchains - a signal that the company is watching where settlement rails are heading, not just where they have been.
Nanu describes his ambition in numerical terms: "By narrowing down our use-cases to three lines of businesses, we've now found the focus where I'm fairly confident we can generate a billion dollars of revenue over the next five to seven years." The current run rate of $120 million in annual revenue leaves meaningful distance to cover. He has covered this kind of distance before.