History
Paytm was founded in August 2010 with an initial investment of about 2 million dollars by Vijay Shekhar Sharma in Noida, in the Delhi national capital region. The parent company, One97 Communications, had been built earlier as a mobile value added services business that supplied ringtones, news and cricket scores to telecom operators, and the payments app grew out of that experience of selling small digital things to large numbers of phone users.[1]
The first version of Paytm did one job: prepaid mobile and DTH recharge. Bill payments for postpaid mobile and landline connections, and card payments, were added in 2013, the same year the company bought Plustxt, a platform that allowed fast text messaging in Indian languages. In October 2011 Sapphire Ventures, formerly SAP Ventures, invested 10 million dollars in the parent company, which gave it the money to keep the service running while usage grew.[1]
The Paytm Wallet, launched in January 2014, was the product that changed the company's trajectory. The Indian Railways and Uber both accepted it as a payment method, which gave users a reason to keep a balance in the wallet. In 2015 the company added school fees, metro recharges, electricity, gas and water bills to the app, followed by bus ticketing and travel bookings.[1]
Investors arrived at the same time as the users. In 2015 Alibaba Group and its affiliate Ant Financial increased their combined stake to about 40 per cent, making them the largest shareholders, and Ratan Tata, the then chairman of Tata Sons, invested as well. In August 2016 MediaTek's investment fund put in money at a valuation above 5 billion dollars, and the same year brought Paytm QR for merchants and train ticket bookings.[1]
Not every 2016 headline was welcome. On 18 November 2016 PayPal filed a case at the Indian trademark office alleging that Paytm's logo used a similar colour combination to its own, a dispute that ran for years without stopping Paytm from using blue.[1]
