Razorpay

Timeline

1. 2014Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, both IIT Roorkee alumni, found Razorpay in Bengaluru as a payment gateway aimed at small online businesses.
2. 2015Razorpay goes through the Y Combinator accelerator and raises an early round from Tiger Global, Yuri Milner and Y Combinator.
3. 2016The company launches payment buttons for small sellers and wins its first large merchants, including a mandate to power payments on the IRCTC ticketing site.
4. 2018RazorpayX, a neo-banking product for businesses, and Razorpay Capital, its lending arm, are launched, taking the company beyond the gateway.
5. 2019Razorpay acquires Opfin, a cloud payroll startup, and launches a corporate credit card with RBL Bank for startups and small firms.
6. 2020Razorpay works with Mastercard on MandateHQ, an interface that helps banks meet the RBI's new rules on recurring card payments.
7. 2020October: a 100 million dollar round led by GIC and Sequoia India values Razorpay at just over 1 billion dollars, making it a unicorn.
8. 2021April: a 160 million dollar round led by Sequoia India and GIC trebles the valuation to 3 billion dollars in less than six months.
9. 2021Razorpay launches Rize, a programme and toolkit for early startups, along with Magic Checkout for faster checkout pages and a tax payment suite.
10. 2021December: a 375 million dollar round led by TCV, Lone Pine Capital and Alkeon Capital values the company at 7.5 billion dollars.
11. 2022Razorpay acquires Ezetap, an offline point of sale company, in a deal that values it at around 150 million to 200 million dollars.
12. 2022The company buys Curlec, a Malaysian fintech, marking its first acquisition outside India.
13. 2022The RBI grants in-principle approval for a payment aggregator and payment gateway licence, then asks Razorpay to pause onboarding new online merchants while it submits further details.
14. 2023During the signup freeze Razorpay leans on existing customers and keeps adding businesses on RazorpayX, the corporate card and offline payments.
15. 2024The Ministry of Corporate Affairs approves the company's reverse flip, moving its parent back to India from the United States.
16. 2025In FY25 revenue from operations rises 65 per cent to Rs 3,783 crore, while a restructuring and tax charge linked to the move to India leaves a net loss of Rs 1,209 crore.
17. 2025Razorpay invites merchant bankers to pitch for its listing, targeting a fresh raise of up to Rs 4,500 crore, and later picks Axis, Kotak, Citi and JPMorgan to manage the issue.
18. 2025The RBI grants Razorpay a cross border payment aggregator licence, and its point of sale arm receives approval for an offline payment aggregator licence.
19. 2026The company files confidential draft papers with SEBI to raise Rs 5,000 crore to Rs 6,000 crore.
20. 2026Razorpay launches an artificial intelligence model trained on four billion transactions, built with Nvidia and Amazon Web Services.
21. 2026Razorpay partners with OpenAI so that Indian brands can advertise inside ChatGPT, using its Engage marketing platform for catalogues and campaigns.
22. 2026At the Global Fintech Fest, chief executive Harshil Mathur argues that India's lead in real time payments can produce global fintech companies.

What it does

Razorpay is an Indian financial technology company that lets businesses accept, hold and move money. Its first and largest product is an online payment gateway that a merchant embeds on its website or application, so customers can pay by card, net banking, wallet or the Unified Payments Interface. Around that gateway the company has built a neo-banking service called RazorpayX for current accounts and payouts, a lending business called Razorpay Capital for working capital, and software for checkout, subscriptions, tax payments and marketing.^[4]

The company describes itself as a full stack financial services provider for businesses rather than a consumer wallet. Merchants use Razorpay to collect payments from customers, pay salaries and vendors, automate tax, and borrow against their own transaction history. By 2021 the company said it was serving more than five million small merchants, and its client list included Swiggy, Zomato, Facebook, Cred, ICICI Prudential and Ola, a set of names that shows how closely its fortunes track India's internet economy.^[5]

Two customers sit at the centre of the model. The first is the small online seller that Razorpay was built for in 2014 and that it serves through self service signup and low pricing. The second is the large enterprise that wants several products from one vendor and is billed on negotiated rates. The company has repeatedly said that the non-payment gateway businesses, meaning banking, lending and software, should grow faster than the gateway itself, which is why it has added products and bought companies rather than only chase payment volume.^[4]

History

Razorpay was founded in 2014 in Bengaluru by Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, both graduates of IIT Roorkee. The two started the company after finding that small online businesses could not get a payment gateway without paperwork, minimum volumes and long approval cycles, and they built a self service product in which a developer could integrate payments in hours. By the time it turned unicorn in 2020 its investor register already included Tiger Global, Y Combinator, Ribbit Capital and Matrix Partners alongside the later lead investors GIC and Sequoia India.^[6]

For its first four years the company was a payments business only. That changed in 2017 and 2018, when it launched RazorpayX and Razorpay Capital. RazorpayX gave a merchant a current account and the ability to run payouts and vendor payments, while Razorpay Capital offered short term loans through partner banks and non-banking finance companies. The company said in 2020 that Razorpay Capital was disbursing about Rs 250 crore a month with an average ticket size of Rs 7 lakh to Rs 10 lakh and that it worked with five finance companies and two banks.^[5]

Growth accelerated sharply in the pandemic years, when a large share of its merchants moved online. The company became a unicorn in October 2020, raised again in April 2021 and again in December 2021, and used the money to expand products, buy companies and prepare for a listing. Since 2022 the emphasis has shifted from raising capital to organising the business for public markets: converting licences, moving the parent company back to India, buying in the parts of the stack it does not build, and, from 2026, filing draft papers for an initial public offering.^[1]

Founders and leadership

Harshil Mathur is the chief executive officer and co-founder, and he has led the company since its first year. He is the public face of Razorpay in policy debates: he has spoken at the Global Fintech Fest about real time payments and about artificial intelligence in fraud defence, and he has argued publicly that the Unified Payments Interface needs sustainable economics behind it. Shashank Kumar, the second co-founder, works on product and technology and has spoken on the company's partnerships, including the ChatGPT advertising deal announced in 2026.^[13]

The leadership layer below the founders has been built out as the company has grown, with senior hires into merchant operations, risk, compliance and product as the licence obligations tightened. The reverse flip completed in 2024 changed the corporate parent without changing the operational leadership, and it was cleared by the Reserve Bank of India before the Ministry of Corporate Affairs gave its approval.^[3]

Ownership is concentrated in the hands of the founders, employees and a long list of financial investors. The founders hold board seats, and the company has run employee stock option buybacks to let staff sell shares before any listing. Razorpay said about 650 current and former employees sold stock options in one such buyback, the fourth and largest since it began operations, following an earlier buyback worth 10 million dollars in March 2021.^[11]

The payment gateway business

The gateway remains the core of Razorpay. A merchant that signs up gets a checkout that accepts cards, net banking, wallets and UPI, a dashboard that reconciles settlements, and a set of tools for refunds, subscriptions and invoices. The company built its early reputation on speed of integration and on serving businesses that traditional gateways ignored, and that base of small merchants became a large source of volume as Indian e-commerce grew through the 2010s.^[6]

Scale followed. By 2021 the company said it was providing payment solutions to more than five million small merchants, with clients including Swiggy, Zomato, Facebook, Cred, ICICI Prudential and Ola, while its neo-banking arm was processing loans worth Rs 700 crore to Rs 800 crore a month through partner lenders.^[5] By 2022, at the time of the Ezetap acquisition, Razorpay said it was powering payments for more than eight million businesses, adding names such as Muthoot Finance and deepening its hold on mid-market merchants. That figure covers registered merchants rather than active ones, but the direction of travel is clear.^[7]

Payment products have been added layer by layer. Payment Pages gave small sellers a hosted, custom branded page for collections, aimed at fee collection in educational institutes, by event organisers and by utility companies for bill payments.^[11] TokenHQ, a card tokenisation service built with Mastercard, RuPay and Visa, lets a merchant replace stored card numbers with tokens, and Razorpay said almost its entire base of five million businesses would be ready to support tokenised card transactions.^[11]

RazorpayX, Capital and the business stack

RazorpayX is the neo-banking arm, aimed at the money a business moves rather than the money it collects. It offers a current account, bulk payouts to vendors and employees, automated payroll after the Opfin acquisition, invoice and expense management, and a corporate credit card issued with a partner bank. The company said in 2021 that RazorpayX was processing loans worth Rs 700 crore to Rs 800 crore every month through partner lenders, work that sits between banking and credit.^[5]

Razorpay Capital supplies the credit. The lending arm began as a marketplace, taking the merchant's transaction history as the basis for a short term facility while partner banks and finance companies held the loan on their books. In 2020 the business was disbursing about Rs 250 crore a month, and the average loan ran for three to six months. The acquisition of TERA Finlabs added technology for credit underwriting, with the company saying it expected to serve more than 10,000 startups and small firms.^[5]

The software layer has become a business in its own right. Razorpay has said its roadmap for RazorpayX runs through vendor management, invoice management, tax payment and expense management, tools that sit next to the money a business already moves through the account.^[11] In 2026 the company launched Razorpay Engage for marketing and catalogue work and used it as the base for its partnership with OpenAI, in which Indian brands prepare product feeds, run campaigns and track performance inside ChatGPT.^[13]

Global business and cross border payments

Razorpay's international ambitions started with South East Asia. When it raised 160 million dollars in April 2021, the company said the money would be used to expand into Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, alongside hiring about 600 people in India and overseas. That push turned into an acquisition in 2022 when Razorpay bought Curlec, a Malaysian fintech, in its first purchase outside India. The company also built a service that helps Indian founders move overseas funding into India, an early sign of where the cross border business was heading.^[8]

The regulatory foundation for that business arrived later. Razorpay received a cross border payment aggregator licence from the Reserve Bank of India, which allows it to handle both inward and outward international payments. With the licence in hand, the company said Indian businesses could accept more than 130 currencies and international companies could operate in India through the same platform. Combined with the domestic payment aggregator licence it already held and the offline payment aggregator licence granted to its point of sale arm, Razorpay now holds a spread of permissions that few Indian competitors match.^[10] The offline licence extended the same regulated status to physical payments at the point of sale.^[11]

The company has also framed cross border payments as a product for exporters, with an account that cuts the cost of overseas bank transfers, and it has invested in early stage software companies through its venture programme. The programme was set up to back early stage business to business startups in fintech, travel, healthcare, hospitality, retail and e-commerce, and the company said it expected India to produce between 10 and 15 business to business unicorns over five years.^[11]

Revenue and financials

Razorpay's revenue is tied to how much money its merchants process. The company takes a fee on each transaction, adds subscription and software revenue, and books interest and fee income from the lending and banking partnerships. Because a large share of Indian online payments runs on the Unified Payments Interface, where the company earns little or nothing on consumer to merchant transfers, its revenue depends heavily on cards, net banking, cross border payments and the software and lending lines.^[1]

The most recent disclosed year was strong at the top and weak at the bottom. For FY25, the year that ended in March 2025, revenue from operations rose 65 per cent to Rs 3,783 crore, and gross profit rose 41 per cent to Rs 1,277 crore. The company reported a net loss of Rs 1,209 crore for the same year, which it attributed to restructuring and tax costs after moving its headquarters to India. That combination, fast growing revenue and a large one time charge, is the number to watch when reading the accounts.^[1]

Earlier years show the same shape of business. Razorpay Software's revenue from operations was Rs 1,481 crore in FY22 and Rs 2,279 crore in FY23, a rise of 54 per cent, with employee benefits and salaries taking about 28 per cent of total expenses and the payments entity itself reporting a flat profit of Rs 7.3 crore in FY23.^[11] The company has repeatedly said that it wants banking, lending and software to contribute a growing share of revenue, and in 2020 it told investors these newer lines would generate almost 35 per cent of revenue within a year.^[5]

The equity on the balance sheet is also large. Across its rounds the company raised about 741.5 million dollars by December 2021.^[4] A secondary sale of 75 million dollars, backed by Lightspeed and Moore Strategic Ventures, let early investors and employees sell shares at the 2021 valuation without the company raising new money.^[11]

Funding and valuation

Razorpay's funding history is a short climb. It turned unicorn in October 2020 with a 100 million dollar round led by Singapore's GIC and Sequoia India, joined by existing investors Ribbit Capital, Tiger Global, Y Combinator and Matrix Partners, which took the valuation to just above a billion dollars and total equity raised to 206.5 million dollars. At the time the company had 1,300 employees and said it would use the money on RazorpayX and Razorpay Capital.^[6]

Six months later the valuation had trebled. In April 2021 the company raised 160 million dollars from Sequoia India and GIC at a valuation of 3 billion dollars, again with Ribbit Capital and Matrix Partners participating, and said it would expand in South East Asia and hire 600 people. The round was described at the time as one of the fastest valuation increases among Indian startups.^[5]

The largest round came in December 2021. Razorpay raised 375 million dollars, or about Rs 2,850 crore, in a Series F led by TCV, Lone Pine Capital and Alkeon Capital, with Tiger Global, Sequoia India, GIC and Y Combinator joining. The valuation reached 7.5 billion dollars, a rise of about two and a half times in eight months and more than seven times in a year. Mint reported that this made Razorpay the most valued privately held fintech in India and the second most valued Indian fintech after Paytm.^[4]

The next chapters of the valuation story are not equity rounds but a listing. Razorpay invited merchant bankers to pitch for an initial public offering and targeted a fresh raise of up to Rs 4,500 crore, then appointed Axis, Kotak, Citi and JPMorgan to manage the issue. In 2026 the company filed confidential draft papers with SEBI to raise Rs 5,000 crore to Rs 6,000 crore, a step that follows shareholder approval for a fresh issue along with an offer for sale.^[2]

Shareholding and ownership

Razorpay is not listed, so its shareholding is known only through disclosures that accompany its funding rounds. The register is a mix of the two founders, employees holding stock options, and financial investors built up over twelve years. Sequoia India, now Peak XV Partners, GIC of Singapore, Tiger Global, Y Combinator, Ribbit Capital, Matrix Partners, TCV, Lone Pine Capital and Alkeon Capital all appear in its rounds, with the earlier investors following their money into later ones.^[4]

Employee ownership has been a deliberate feature. The company has run four employee stock option buybacks since it started in 2014, the largest of which allowed about 650 current and former employees to sell shares, following a 10 million dollar buyback in March 2021. Buybacks of this kind convert paper wealth into cash before a listing, and they are usually a signal that the company expects to go public.^[4]

The corporate structure changed in 2024. Razorpay had been held through a United States parent, and it applied to move the holding company back to India under amended rules that did not require a court process. The move, known as a reverse flip, needed approval from the Reserve Bank of India and then from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, which it received. The change matters to investors because an Indian parent makes a domestic listing simpler and removes a layer of regulatory friction.^[3]

Employees and offices

Razorpay is headquartered in Bengaluru and organised around its engineering, product, risk and merchant operations teams. When it turned unicorn in October 2020 it had about 1,300 employees, of whom 550 had joined in the previous year, and it planned to hire 500 more across growth, product and technology. In 2021 the company said it would add about 600 people in India and overseas as part of its South East Asia expansion.^[6]

Hiring has continued in waves. Razorpay said in 2021 that it was looking to hire more than 650 employees over the following ten months, taking the headcount up with every new licence and product line.^[11] The acquisition of Ezetap brought about 300 employees into the group, who continued to run the offline payments business as a separate unit rather than being absorbed into the core team.^[7]

The workforce also reflects the regulatory work that now sits inside the company. Holding payment aggregator and cross border licences means compliance, risk, settlement and audit functions that a pure software business would not need, and the tightening of payment rules since 2022 has made those teams larger. The company has continued to hire senior people into product and operations roles as it prepares to report to public shareholders.^[3]

Acquisitions and joint ventures

Razorpay has bought companies to fill gaps rather than to add scale, and the pattern is consistent: payroll, fraud analytics, offline payments, international entry, loyalty and credit technology. Opfin, a cloud payroll startup acquired in 2019, became the base of its HR and payroll product and complemented RazorpayX. Thirdwatch, a fraud analytics firm bought in 2019, fed into the risk systems that decide whether a transaction should be allowed.^[7]

The largest deal was Ezetap. Razorpay acquired the Bengaluru based point of sale company in 2022 in a cash and equity transaction that valued it at around 150 million to 200 million dollars, the company's biggest acquisition. Ezetap had been founded in 2011 by Abhijit Bose and Bhaktha Keshavachar, served more than 500,000 touchpoints and processed more than 10 billion dollars in annual transactions. Chief executive Harshil Mathur said offline was a large part of digital business and that a single platform across online and offline had become necessary as UPI blurred the two.^[7]

The Curlec deal was described at the time as Razorpay's fifth acquisition since it began operations in 2014 and it came in the same stretch as the company's international foray, which is how a domestic payments business became the owner of a licensed Malaysian one.^[8] Razorpay has also invested rather than acquired where a stake was enough, running a venture programme that backs early stage business to business companies in fintech, travel, healthcare, hospitality, retail and e-commerce.^[11]

Partnerships have done some of the work that acquisitions might have done. MandateHQ was built with Mastercard, card tokenisation was launched with Mastercard, RuPay and Visa, an in-store UP switch was launched with Airtel Payments Bank, and in 2026 it announced a tie-up with superU AI for a transaction system in which artificial intelligence agents handle sales and payments with no human intervention, so a purchase can be completed in a conversation rather than in an application.^[11] The OpenAI agreement, in which Razorpay's marketing platform helps brands advertise inside ChatGPT, belongs to the same pattern.^[13]

Regulation and licensing

Razorpay operates under the Reserve Bank of India's payment rules, and its growth has been shaped by them. The RBI issues a payment aggregator licence to companies that process payments for merchants and a payment gateway permit to companies that supply the technology. Razorpay received in-principle approval for both in July 2022, and in December 2022 the regulator asked it to pause onboarding new online merchants until it submitted additional details for the final licence. The company said it complied and that existing merchants were unaffected.^[9]

The pause was narrower than it looked. Razorpay continued to onboard businesses onto RazorpayX, its corporate card and its offline payments business, and it leaned on existing customers for growth while the online merchant signup waited. That period coincided with a general tightening of payment regulation in India, and it ended with the company holding the licences. By 2025 the RBI had granted Razorpay a cross border payment aggregator licence, and its point of sale arm had received approval for an offline payment aggregator licence.^[10]

The other live regulatory question is what merchants pay for UPI. The Lok Sabha passed the Taxation and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill in 2026, removing the legal bar on banks and payment companies charging a merchant discount rate on notified digital payment modes, though the law does not itself set a rate. Razorpay and PhonePe both backed charges for larger merchants while saying consumers would not be charged, a position the Payments Council of India also took. Chief executive Mathur said the system needed sustainable economics to keep funding reliability, security and innovation.^[14]

Competition

Razorpay competes on two fronts. In online payments it faces PhonePe and Paytm, which own the largest consumer payment applications in the country, along with Cashfree, BillDesk, CCAvenue and the payment arms of banks. In business banking and lending it meets Pine Labs, which moved from point of sale terminals into merchant software, plus a long list of newer companies selling current accounts, payouts and credit to small firms.^[14]

Its position is strong in the merchant segment rather than the consumer one. The company does not run a wallet that ordinary shoppers use, so it does not have to fund consumer cashbacks to keep traffic, and its revenue comes from businesses that pay for reliability and software. That difference shows up in the way it talks about itself: the pitch is fewer failures, faster settlement and a wider product set, not a better deal for the person paying.^[5]

The 2026 debate over UPI charges put the competitive map on display. PhonePe and Razorpay, normally rivals for merchant volume, published nearly identical positions on merchant charges, and Pine Labs chief executive Amrish Rau called the legal amendment a step in the right direction. On the same day Razorpay was announcing an artificial intelligence model with Nvidia and Amazon Web Services, showing that the fight has moved from who has the most merchants to who can approve more payments, catch more fraud and sell more software to the same merchant.^[12]

Controversies and criticism

The sharpest controversy came in 2022, when Alt News, the fact checking website, said Razorpay had handed its donor data to the police without informing it or running a preliminary check on any violation. The allegation came while Delhi Police was investigating donations received by Alt News and had arrested its co-founder Mohammed Zubair. The episode raised a question that every payment company faces, which is how much of a merchant's or donor's information a platform should pass to investigators.^[15]

The company has also been a victim of fraud, and the numbers were large. Razorpay's head of legal disputes and law enforcement told the South East Cyber Crime Cell that the company was unable to reconcile the receipt of Rs 7.38 crore against 831 transactions, describing a mix of hackers and fraudulent customers. The complaint was lodged on 16 May, and it underlined how much of a payment company's operating cost sits in fraud control rather than in technology.^[16]

Brand impersonation has driven legal action of a different kind. The Delhi High Court directed social media platforms to remove accounts that were misusing Razorpay's trademark in fake recruitment and investment scams, and instructed banks to freeze the accounts used by the fraudsters. Razorpay obtained a John Doe order, the kind of order that can be enforced against unknown defendants, to protect customers from scams run in its name.^[15]

The regulatory pause of 2022 is sometimes described as a setback for the company, and it is worth reading precisely. The RBI asked Razorpay to withhold onboarding new online merchants while it submitted details for the final licence, not to stop operating, and the company kept onboarding on its other services. Three years later it held cross border and offline payment licences as well, so the episode reads as the price of operating a regulated business rather than as a single failure.^[10]

Reading the numbers

Three numbers summarise Razorpay's recent accounts. Revenue from operations of Rs 3,783 crore in FY25 was up 65 per cent on the year before, which is fast for a company of its size. Gross profit of Rs 1,277 crore was up 41 per cent, a slower rate than revenue, which means the cost of processing payments grew faster than the money collected for them. And a net loss of Rs 1,209 crore, described by the company as the result of restructuring and tax after moving its headquarters to India, turned a growing operation into a loss making year on paper.^[1]

The distance between revenue and gross profit is where the business question sits. Payment companies pay interchange, network and bank charges on every transaction, so a merchant mix tilted towards cards and cross border payments earns more per rupee processed than one tilted towards UPI, where the fee is minimal. Growth in lending and software is the part of the model that can raise gross margin, and that is why Razorpay keeps buying and building there.^[1]

For a company preparing to list, the other numbers that matter are the ones that show durability: the licence portfolio, the merchant base, and how much revenue comes from a merchant's second or third product rather than from the gateway alone. Razorpay has said since 2021 that newer lines should supply an increasing share of revenue, and its funding documents described a plan to become a full stack financial services company rather than a gateway with extras.^[4]

Finally, the valuation is not a price that any market has set. It was assigned in December 2021, when Indian fintech valuations peaked, and the company has not raised a priced round since. Until a listing puts a public price on the shares, the 7.5 billion dollar figure from 2021 describes investor sentiment at a moment rather than the value of the business in 2026.^[4]

Related entries

• Harshil Mathur, co-founder and chief executive, who has led the company since its first year.
• Shashank Kumar, co-founder, who works on product and technology.
• Pine Labs, which competes in merchant payments and moved from point of sale terminals into software.
• Paytm and PhonePe, the consumer payment platforms Razorpay meets in merchant signups and in the UPI charging debate.
• Groww, another Bengaluru fintech that raised at speed in 2021 and has since listed, which makes it a useful comparison for Razorpay's own listing.
• Ezetap, the offline payments company Razorpay acquired in 2022.