Two IIT Roorkee graduates visited 100+ bankers, got rejected repeatedly, applied to Y Combinator twice, and then built the financial plumbing that 8 million Indian businesses depend on. Razorpay didn't just build a payment gateway — it built India's financial operating system.
Razorpay Software Private Limited
B2B Fintech · Payment Gateway · Banking-as-a-Service
2014 · Bengaluru (originally Jaipur)
Harshil Mathur (CEO) & Shashank Kumar (MD) — IIT Roorkee classmates
$9.2 Billion (June 2025) · Latest round raised $742M total
₹2,501 Crore operating revenue · ₹3,930 Cr in FY25 · PAT ₹34 Cr (first profit)
8M+ merchants · $180B annualised TPV · 450K+ customers · 40 new products in FY24
Y Combinator, Tiger Global, GIC, Sequoia/Peak XV, Lightspeed, Mastercard
Razorpay is the invisible infrastructure that powers India's digital economy. When you pay on Zomato, Ola, CRED, Swiggy, or any of 8 million other Indian businesses, Razorpay is the plumbing beneath the surface. It started as a payment gateway, evolved into a full financial stack, and became profitable — a rare achievement for a B2B infrastructure company of this scale. It is the closest thing India has to Stripe, except it was built natively for the complexity of Indian banking, UPI, and GST compliance.
Razorpay is India's full-stack payment and financial services platform. But calling it a payment gateway undersells it by about five product lines. What began as a clean solution to India's famously messy payment acceptance problem has evolved into a platform that handles everything from accepting payments to paying vendors, managing payroll, offering business loans, and running neo-banking accounts for 25,000+ businesses.
The company's core value proposition has remained constant: make it simple for any Indian business to accept digital payments. In 2014, that was a genuine engineering challenge — India had dozens of payment methods (credit cards, debit cards, net banking, wallets, EMI), multiple bank integrations, and terrible developer documentation. Razorpay built clean APIs, excellent documentation, and a developer-first experience that made it the default choice for every Indian startup building a payments layer.
Today, Razorpay processes over $180 billion in annualised transaction volume. Every rupee that flows through its system generates a fraction as revenue — and at $180 billion in TPV, fractions add up to $483 million in revenue and a newly profitable P&L.
Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar met at IIT Roorkee. After graduating, they both went overseas — Harshil to Schlumberger as a field engineer, Shashank to Microsoft. But the lure of building something for India's exploding internet economy was too strong. They came back with an idea: payments in India were broken, and developers were suffering the most.
In 2013, they started sketching Razorpay from Jaipur, where Harshil grew up and where living costs were low enough that a bootstrapped startup could breathe. The founding story is a study in persistent rejection. They visited over 100 banks trying to get a payment gateway license. Most didn't return calls. Some laughed at them. The Indian banking establishment, protected behind regulatory complexity and bureaucratic inertia, had no interest in enabling two young engineers to disrupt their fee-rich payment processing business.
"We went to a hundred banks. We got rejected by all of them. Then we got into Y Combinator, and suddenly the same banks started calling us."
— Harshil Mathur, CEO, RazorpayThey applied to Y Combinator in 2014 — and were rejected. They applied again. Got in. The YC batch gave them credibility, a global network, and the funding to push harder on the bank relationships. By 2015, they had their first payment gateway license, their first merchant integrations, and a clean dashboard that made payments in India feel, for the first time, like they did in the rest of the world. Razorpay was off.
In 2014, accepting digital payments as an Indian business was genuinely painful. CCAvenue and PayU existed but were notoriously unreliable. Success rates on payment flows were often below 80% — meaning 1 in 5 customers who tried to pay couldn't complete the transaction. APIs were poorly documented. Developer support was non-existent. Integration times ran into weeks. For startups trying to move fast, India's payment infrastructure was a serious handicap.
Razorpay's business model is architecturally elegant: every rupee that flows through its system generates a small, nearly automatic revenue share. As India's digital economy grows, the absolute value of that revenue share grows proportionally. The company doesn't need to win customers away from incumbents — it just needs India to keep going digital, which it is doing at historic pace.
| Revenue Stream | How It Works | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Payment Gateway Commission | ~2% take rate on card transactions; lower on UPI. Core revenue — ₹2,068 Cr in FY24, up 24% | Primary |
| RazorpayX (Neobanking) | Business banking accounts, current accounts, vendor payouts, treasury management | Core |
| Razorpay Capital (Lending) | Working capital loans to merchants based on transaction history — low default rates, high relevance | Growing |
| Payroll (Opfin) | Automated payroll processing for businesses — acquired via Opfin acquisition | Expanding |
| International Payments | Accept payments from global customers — important for India's booming SaaS export economy | Scaling |
| POS (Razorpay POS) | Offline payment terminals — Q-Zap system reduces billing time by 40% | New |
Razorpay's go-to-market was textbook developer-led growth. Build the best developer experience. Let engineers at startups choose your product. Those startups grow into enterprises. The enterprises bring scale. By 2024, Razorpay's merchant list reads like a who's who of Indian digital commerce — Zomato, Ola, CRED, Swiggy, Dunzo, BookMyShow, and 8 million others.
Each Razorpay product expansion followed the same logic: identify a financial pain point that businesses face adjacent to payments, build a better solution, and offer it to the existing 8 million merchant base. Payroll, banking, lending, international payments — each one added retention and revenue without acquiring a single new customer. The payment gateway became the distribution engine for an entire financial platform.
Razorpay, like many Indian startups, originally incorporated in the US for easier venture investment. As it prepares for an Indian IPO, it is executing a "reverse flip" — relocating its domicile from the US back to India. This process involves complex tax and legal restructuring, but it is strategically essential for accessing India's domestic capital markets and retail investor base.
The rise of UPI is both Razorpay's greatest tailwind and a structural risk. UPI transactions are mandated to be zero-fee — meaning every UPI payment Razorpay processes generates no direct revenue. As UPI becomes the dominant payment method in India, maintaining revenue growth requires Razorpay to shift its value — and its fee — away from the transaction itself and toward value-added services like analytics, reconciliation, and credit.
Razorpay won India's payment market not with sales teams but with great documentation. Every developer who chose Razorpay for their weekend project eventually became a decision-maker at a funded startup. The technical community's trust is a distribution channel that money cannot buy.
Switching payment gateways requires engineering effort, risk tolerance, and downtime. Every merchant who integrates Razorpay deeply into their checkout flow has a real switching cost. Infrastructure stickiness is the most durable moat in software.
100 bank rejections didn't stop Razorpay. Each rejection taught them more about the regulatory landscape. By the time they had their gateway license, they knew the system better than most bankers. Persistent founders who treat rejection as learning consistently outlast those who don't.
Rather than paying to acquire new customers for every new product, Razorpay offered each new product to its 8M existing merchants first. The payment gateway funded the creation of every adjacent product at near-zero marginal customer acquisition cost.
Razorpay is one of the most consequential B2B companies India has ever produced. It built the financial plumbing of an entire digital economy — quietly, deeply, with exceptional technical quality. When 8 million merchants trust a single company to process their revenue, that company has achieved something extraordinary: it has become infrastructure. Not a nice-to-have. Not a best-in-class option. Infrastructure. With profitability achieved, revenue growing 57%, and an IPO on the horizon, Razorpay is entering the chapter where the market recognizes what engineers have known for a decade — that India's most important payment company is the one nobody ever sees.