Razorpay
Founders
Harshil Mathur, Shashank Kumar · Founded 2014 · HQ today: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Razorpay was founded by Harshil Mathur, Shashank Kumar in 2014. It is now led by Harshil Mathur.
In 2014 Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, friends from IIT Roorkee, were working on a crowdfunding idea when they found that getting an online payment gateway in India meant heavy paperwork and long delays. They dropped the original project to fix payments, got into Y Combinator's Winter 2015 batch, and built Razorpay around a simple, self-serve API.
| Founder | Role at founding | Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Harshil Mathur | Co-founder & CEO | — |
| Shashank Kumar | Co-founder & MD | — |
IIT Roorkee graduate who worked at Schlumberger before co-founding Razorpay.
Harshil Mathur co-founded Razorpay in 2014 with Shashank Kumar after struggling to set up online payments for a crowdfunding project. As CEO he has led the company through Y Combinator, funding rounds up to a $7.5 billion valuation in 2021, expansion into banking and POS, the 2025 reverse flip and the 2026 IPO filing. Harshil Mathur was born in 1991.
Indian software engineer and IIT Roorkee graduate.
Shashank Kumar co-founded Razorpay in 2014 alongside Harshil Mathur. Frustrated by the absolute nightmare of integrating archaic, highly bureaucratic bank payment gateways (which took weeks of paperwork) while trying to build a crowdfunding site, he built Razorpay. As the technical architect, he designed the incredibly simple, developer-friendly API that allowed any Indian startup to accept payments in less than an hour. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Harshil Mathur
Co-founder & CEO
Grew Razorpay into one of India's largest payment companies, with ~$439 million (₹3,783 crore) FY25 revenue.
Shashank Kumar
Co-founder & Managing Director
As Co-Founder and Managing Director, he acts as the absolute driving force behind the company's incredibly rapid product innovation, fiercely defending its dominance against legacy banks.
Razorpay was founded in 2014 in Jaipur and Bengaluru, India, by IIT Roorkee classmates and software engineers Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar.
While attempting to launch a crowdfunding portal for schools, the founders discovered that integrating an Indian payment gateway required weeks of physical paperwork, in-person bank branch visits, and large upfront security deposits. Frustrated by the terrible developer experience, they dropped their original idea to build the 'Stripe for India'.
Razorpay joined Y Combinator's Winter 2015 batch, among the first Indian startups to do so, which helped it refine its developer-first strategy and raise early capital.
Prominent Indian tech leaders including Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, InMobi's Naveen Tewari, and Matrix Partners India invested early angel capital, recognizing the large need for a modern payment gateway in India's booming e-commerce market.
In November 2016, when the Indian government demonetized high-value currency notes, millions of merchants and consumers rushed to adopt digital payments overnight. Razorpay's instant digital onboarding and 99.9% uptime allowed thousands of businesses to transition to digital commerce in hours.
After graduating from Y Combinator, the founders relocated corporate headquarters from Jaipur to Bengaluru (India's Silicon Valley), building a high-quality campus (The Razorpay HQ) that houses thousands of engineers, data scientists, and fintech innovators.
The founding principles of developer-first simplicity, transparent pricing, unshakeable technical reliability, and empowerment of Indian entrepreneurs remain the guiding soul of Razorpay.
Razorpay has run several ESOP buybacks to give employees liquidity, and ESOP expenses were a major part of its FY25 loss.
Razorpay was founded in 2014 by Harshil Mathur (CEO) and Shashank Kumar (Managing Director), who met as undergraduate roommates at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee.
The founders originally tried building an online crowdfunding portal in Jaipur to help indie film creators and student projects raise money; however, they discovered that integrating online payment systems in India was nearly impossible for small startups.
Frustrated by the cumbersome banking bureaucracy, Mathur and Kumar abandoned their crowdfunding project and spent months in Jaipur coding a clean, developer-friendly payment gateway with simple JavaScript snippets.
The founders applied to Y Combinator with an early demo; impressed by their technical velocity and the massive untapped market in India, YC accepted Razorpay into Batch W15, making them the first Indian fintech in the accelerator.
During YC Demo Day, the founders raised $2.5 million from prominent investors including Soma Capital, Matrix Partners India, and angel investors such as Kunal Bahl, Rohit Bansal (Snapdeal), and Punit Soni.
As college students, Mathur and Kumar were active leaders in IIT Roorkee’s Information Management Group (IMG), designing campus software and inspiring a vibrant culture of student software startups.
Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar are prolific angel investors, funding and mentoring dozens of early-stage Indian software, SaaS, and fintech startups through their personal capital.
The founders’ core principle—that financial software should be as simple and frictionless to integrate as a single line of code—remains Razorpay’s driving product compass.
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