The Jaipur Flat: Origin Story of Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar
The genesis of Razorpay began in early 2014 inside a modest rented apartment in Jaipur. Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, close friends and batchmates who had graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee, were working in corporate careers. Mathur had worked at Schlumberger and Kumar at Microsoft.
United by an entrepreneurial drive, the duo decided to build a crowdfunding platform in India to help school and university students raise micro-donations for scientific projects and social causes. But when they attempted to integrate an online payment gateway to accept credit cards and net banking, they collided with the Kafkaesque reality of Indian banking. In 2014, legacy payment aggregators and public-sector banks demanded that a startup possess an established physical commercial office, audited financial balance sheets for three consecutive years, physical notarized paper documents, and tens of thousands of rupees in non-refundable setup fees. Even after weeks of in-person verification, approval took over a month, and checkout forms had payment failure rates exceeding 40%.
Mathur and Kumar experienced an epiphany: if two talented IIT graduates with corporate engineering backgrounds could not get a payment gateway, how could the next generation of Indian software founders ever launch a business? Abandoning the crowdfunding portal, they dedicated themselves to solving digital payments. Working day and night in Jaipur, they built the first prototype of Razorpay: a payment gateway inspired by Stripe's developer-first elegance, featuring clean RESTful APIs, zero upfront setup fees, a responsive JavaScript checkout modal, and automated digital KYC that onboarded merchants in thirty minutes. In late 2014, they submitted a video application to Silicon Valley's Y Combinator. They were accepted into the Winter 2015 batch in Mountain View, California, one of the first Indian startups to go through the accelerator.
The Developer Revolution: How Razorpay Conquered the Indian Startup Ecosystem
When Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar returned to Bengaluru from Silicon Valley in 2015, established payment executives dismissed them. Skeptics claimed that in India, corporate software was sold over lavish corporate golf dinners to senior Chief Financial Officers, not through self-serve online websites. Razorpay proved the entire industry wrong by initiating a developer-led revolution.
Razorpay recognized that in the software era, software engineers and product managers, not procurement departments, decided which payment gateway to implement. If a developer could integrate a payment gateway before lunch, test it in sandbox mode with mock API keys, and deploy it to production without speaking to a sales representative, that gateway won. Razorpay published immaculate API documentation, pre-built SDKs for every major programming language (Node.js, Python, PHP, Ruby, Java, Go), and smooth plugins for WordPress, WooCommerce, and Shopify.
When the Indian government announced demonetization in November 2016 followed by the rapid national rollout of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), Razorpay was the first gateway to launch fully integrated UPI APIs. Indian tech startups, from Zomato, Swiggy, and CRED to Zerodha, Byju's, and BookMyShow, standardized on Razorpay. That early adoption among startups became Razorpay's core distribution advantage.
RazorpayX: Inventing Full-Stack Business Neobanking in India
By 2018, Razorpay dominated payment collection ('money-in'), but Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar realized that enterprise financial friction extended far beyond merchant checkouts. Indian businesses spent countless hours manually logging into clunky commercial bank portals to upload Excel spreadsheets, execute vendor payouts, pay employee salaries, and file monthly TDS, GST, and provident fund tax returns. Commercial banking was fragmented, manual, and prone to human error.
In November 2018, Razorpay launched RazorpayX, a business neobanking platform that transformed corporate banking. Built in partnership with leading scheduled commercial banks, RazorpayX provided enterprises with API-driven current accounts, corporate credit cards, and automated payout engines:
- Automated Vendor Payouts: Businesses can disburse payments to thousands of suppliers, contractors, and delivery partners instantly via API, 24/7/365, eliminating manual bank portal uploads.
- RazorpayX Payroll: Following the strategic acquisition of Opfin in 2019, Razorpay created an automated payroll engine that computes salaries, tracks leave, deducts statutory taxes (TDS, PF, PT, ESIC), and deposits paychecks into employee bank accounts in three clicks.
- Corporate Expense Cards: In collaboration with Visa and SBM Bank, RazorpayX issued smart corporate credit cards with dynamic credit limits and automated expense management, eliminating petty cash receipts.
RazorpayX transformed Razorpay from a single-product payment processor into an indispensable financial operating system managing both sides of the corporate ledger, processing both money-in from consumers and money-out to suppliers and employees.
Omnichannel Expansion: Razorpay POS and Cross-Border Horizons
Having conquered digital checkout and business banking, Razorpay launched an aggressive offensive into physical retail commerce. In 2022-2023, the company unveiled Razorpay POS, deploying sleek Android-powered smart swipe terminals and audio Soundboxes across retail stores, restaurants, supermarkets, and pharmacies. By unifying offline in-store payments with online web transactions, Razorpay provides merchants with a single, consolidated dashboard of all consumer transactions, loyalty data, and inventory reconciliations.
Simultaneously, Razorpay initiated its international expansion into Southeast Asia. In February 2022, Razorpay acquired Malaysian recurring payments fintech Curlec for an undisclosed sum, rebranding it as Curlec by Razorpay. Operating under full regulatory approval from Bank Negara Malaysia, Curlec serves as Razorpay's springboard across ASEAN, allowing multinational merchants to accept payments smoothly across India, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia.
Financials, Reverse Flip and the 2026 IPO
Razorpay's consolidated revenue from operations rose 65% to ~$439 million (₹3,783 crore) in FY25 (year ended 31 March 2025) from ~$266 million (₹2,296 crore) in FY24, and gross profit grew 41% to ~$148 million (₹1,277 crore). It reported a net loss of ~$140 million (₹1,209 crore), which it linked to ESOP expenses and one-time costs of redomiciling.
In March 2025 shareholders approved converting the company to Razorpay Software Limited, and in May 2025 the Ministry of Corporate Affairs approved the merger of the US parent, Razorpay Inc., into the Indian entity, completing the reverse flip. Press reports estimated the related tax at about $144 million (₹1,245 crore).
Razorpay reportedly appointed Axis Capital, Kotak, Citi and JPMorgan as IPO bankers in February 2026 and confidentially filed draft papers with SEBI in June 2026. Reports put the issue at ₹5,000-6,000 crore and the valuation target at $5-6 billion, below the $7.5 billion set in its December 2021 round, with a listing aimed for the end of 2026.
