Razorpay

The journey of building the ecosystem from scratch started in 2014, when Harshil Mathur (CEO & Co-Founder) and Shashank Kumar (MD & Co-Founder) were working on a crowdfunding portal project for India, they soon realized that most of the online payment gateway solutions were extremely cumbersome to get started on, especially for startups and SMEs. The company was surprised to see that the simple process of accepting payments was not streamlined. So they went about building an ecosystem from scratch with a hyperfocus on making the lives of businesses simpler and that's how Razorpay was born. The company witnessed the dismal state of the online payments industry in India and understood that they have a larger and more important issue to solve - democratizing payments for Indian businesses, particularly the underserved market, the SMEs. Razorpay today powers online payments for 34 of the 42 startups in India that became unicorns in 2022.

Razorpay enables payments and banking solutions for over 10Mn businesses, including the likes of Facebook, Airtel, Lenskart, Mirae Asset Capital markets, Indian Oil, National Pension Scheme, TataConsultancy Services, Swiggy, CRED, BookMyShow, Ola, Zomato, Swiggy, ICICI Prudential among others. The core premise of the vision and values that Razorpay was founded in 2014 is the same as the organization practices today. It is to make money movement simpler and easier. Razorpay is on the path of building the Central Nervous System of Digital India, the next-gen payments and banking infrastructure for Digital India. The company will continue building an ecosystem that will not just build intelligent products that will make the lives of businesses easy and efficient but also drive financial growth and innovation for small businesses. All this is being done, together, in collaboration with banks, regulators, and stakeholders so that India can build a better place for doing business.

Razorpay’s valuation jumped from $1 billion to $7.5 billion in just 14 month in 2021 and has added a host of marquee investors to its captable. Razorpay is also the second Indian company to be a part of Silicon Valley’s largest tech accelerator, Y Combinator. Marquee investors such as Lone Pine Capital, Alkeon Capital, TCV, GIC, Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital India, Ribbit Capital, Matrix Partners, Salesforce Ventures, Y Combinator, and MasterCard have invested a total of $741.5 Mn through Series A, B, C, D, E and F funding. The last financing round of Series F led the company’s valuation to $7.5 Billion signaling one of the fastest increases in valuation for an Indian Unicorn. Razorpay plans to further scale up its Business Banking Suite, RazorpayX, and again build new banking solutions in 2023 that will help businesses focus less on handling compliance, operations and more on growth.

This commitment to make lives simpler will continue at a much deeper level now, thanks to the opportunity to make acquisitions with like-minded companies. In total, till date, Razorpay has made seven acquisitions over the course of time:

Acquired Ezetap in 2022 - India’s leading offline POS company, PoshVine in 2022 - India’s leading fintech startup that provides payments-linked loyalty solutions to payment networks, banks, and businesses, IZealiant in 2022 - A mobile-first, API-enabled, and cloud-ready payment solution and made its first international foray in South-East Asia by announcing its acquisition of Curlec in 2022 - A Recurring revenue platform. TeraFin Labs in 2021 - the AI-based SaaS platform that facilitates digital financing solutions. RazorpayX Payroll in 2019 - a Payroll and HR Management Software company, to solve for seamless automation of a business’s entire payroll process, and Thirdwatch in 2019 - an Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven company specializing in big data and machine learning for real-time fraud prevention.

Customer has always been at the core of all disruption that the company does, from addressing evolving needs to delivering new solutions:

• This hyperfocus helped bring Razorpay’s several Industry first innovation into the market since 2014. Razorpay became the first to launch completely digital on-boarding process for startups, first to launch support for UPI, first to launch support for Bharath QR, first to introduce recurring payments for businesses through Razorpay Route, automating payment receipts and later automating payouts and making the entire process seamless and optimized and many more were introduced aling the way. Other firsts include:

• First to launch India’s Multi-Network Tokenisation solution, TokenHQ

• Razorpay became India’s first payment gateway to support credit cards on UPI

• Razorpay also became India’s largest omnichannel payment gateway for businesses post acquiring Ezetap which is India’s leading offline POS company that was founded with the aim to simplify the in-person offline payments experience.

• Razorpay expanded health insurance policy to include LGBTQIA+ and Live-In Partners- This industry-first move made Razorpay the first Fintech unicorn in India to introduce a thoughtfully diverse and highly inclusive insurance policy for its team members. The new insurance policy, introduced recently, is applicable to all current team members of Razorpay.