Harshil Mathur, entrepreneur and business | hoodpedia
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Harshil Mathur
Harshil Mathur is an Indian entrepreneur who co-founded Razorpay in 2014 with Shashank Kumar and runs it as chief executive officer. He built a payment gateway that a small seller could switch on without paperwork, and turned it into a full stack financial services company valued at 7.5 billion dollars in 2021 and preparing to list. He is one of the most quoted voices in Indian payments policy, arguing that the country's real time rails can produce fintech companies that serve markets outside India.
Last edited 15 October 20261 revisions16 sourcesReading time 25 min
Timeline
About 2010Joins the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee for an engineering degree, where he meets his future business partner Shashank Kumar.
2014Founds Razorpay in Bengaluru with Shashank Kumar, building a payment gateway that a small online business can start using without paperwork or minimum volume commitments.
2015Razorpay goes through the Y Combinator winter batch, the first Indian fintech the accelerator backed, and raises 9 million dollars from Tiger Global and Matrix Partners.
2016The company opens the Unified Payments Interface to its merchants and adds payment buttons and payment links aimed at small sellers and freelancers.
January 2018Raises 20 million dollars led by Tiger Global, with Y Combinator and existing investors participating.
2018About 140 employees sell stock options to Tiger Global at a 50 per cent premium to the previous valuation, the company's first staff liquidity event, when the payroll is roughly 250 people.
June 2019Razorpay raises 75 million dollars and amends its board rights so that each founder holds two votes per board seat against one vote for each investor.
2019The company buys Thirdwatch, a fraud analytics firm, and begins moving beyond the gateway into lending and vendor payments.
December 2019Razorpay says it will add 400 employees by the middle of 2020 and appoints Arpit Chug, previously finance chief at American Express, as its own chief financial officer.
2020Onboards seven lakh new small businesses in twelve months as the pandemic pushes shops online, with more than half of the digital transaction volume coming from businesses in tier two and tier three cities.
October 2020A 100 million dollar round led by GIC and Sequoia India takes Razorpay past a billion dollar valuation, making it a unicorn.
April 2021A 160 million dollar round led by Sequoia India and GIC trebles the valuation to 3 billion dollars in less than six months.
July 2021He and other Razorpay executives set up MarsShot Ventures, an angel fund that has already made about 15 investments when it is announced.
November 2021A 375 million dollar round led by TCV, Lone Pine Capital and Alkeon Capital values Razorpay at 7.5 billion dollars and takes the total equity raised to about 741.5 million dollars.
2022The Reserve Bank of India grants in principle approval for a payment aggregator licence and then asks the company to pause onboarding new online merchants while it examines the application.
December 2023After close to a year of the signup freeze, the regulator grants Razorpay the payment aggregator licence, and the company resumes adding merchants.
2024The Ministry of Corporate Affairs clears the company's reverse flip, moving its parent back to India from the United States.
FY25Razorpay reports revenue from operations up 65 per cent to about 3,783 crore rupees and a net loss of about 1,209 crore rupees after a one time charge linked to the move to India.
2025The company invites merchant bankers to pitch for its listing and the Reserve Bank grants it a cross border payment aggregator licence.
2025Its point of sale arm receives approval for an offline payment aggregator licence.
2026Razorpay files confidential draft papers with the market regulator to raise between 5,000 crore and 6,000 crore rupees.
2026The company launches an artificial intelligence model trained on four billion payments, built with Nvidia and Amazon Web Services, to improve payment success rates and fraud detection.
2026Razorpay partners with OpenAI so that Indian brands can advertise inside ChatGPT, with Tanishq, Tata Neu and Axis Max Life among the first advertisers.
April 2026At the first Y Combinator Startup School held in Bengaluru, he says the payments market he described as a 60 billion dollar opportunity in his 2014 application is now 180 billion dollars of volume on Razorpay alone.
August 2026He backs charges on large merchant transactions while saying that everyday Unified Payments Interface payments stay free for consumers.
September 2026At the Global Fintech Fest he argues that India's lead in real time payments can produce fintech companies that serve global markets, the way American internet leadership produced global technology firms.
Early life and family
Harshil Mathur is one of the least documented of the founders this directory covers, and the gap is worth stating plainly rather than filling in. The business press reports his age, his education and his company in detail and his family not at all, so there is no published date of birth, no birthplace, no parent's name and no sibling on the record. What can be said from a large publisher is narrow: The Economic Times described him as the 25 year old co-founder of Razorpay in 2016, which places his birth around 1990 or 1991 and his age around 35 in 2026.[11]
The one relationship that is fully documented is the one that made the company: his partnership with Shashank Kumar, whom he met as a student at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee. The two of them founded Razorpay together in 2014, they still run it together, and they amended their board rights in 2019 so that the founders as a pair hold a majority of votes on every resolution, a deliberate choice to keep control of a business in the hands of the two people who started it.[1][2][7]
Where a fact about a private individual has not been published, this entry does not state one. That rule matters more on this page than on most, because a search for the founder of a large payments company returns a long tail of profile sites that invent a wife, a school and a hometown to fill a template. None of those details are in the publishers this directory treats as reliable, and a directory that repeats them is not more useful than the sites that made them up.[11][12]
What the record does carry, unusually, is the shape of his ordinary taste: a favourite film, a favourite book, a favourite cuisine, the gadget he travels with. Those answers were given in an interview and they survive on the publisher's own page, and they are the closest thing to a portrait of the man outside his work that any large outlet has printed.[12]
Education
Mathur is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, and the company has always described itself as founded by Roorkee alumni, which is a piece of marketing that happens to be true. The institute is where the founder story begins: he and Shashank Kumar were students there at the same time, and the partnership that became Razorpay was formed inside a campus rather than inside an industry.[1][2]
The education is documented, the discipline is not. No publisher in the record states whether his degree was in computer science, electronics or another branch, and this entry does not guess. What is clear is that both founders came to payments with an engineering training and a developer's view of the product, which is visible in the way the company has always sold itself: an application programming interface that a developer can integrate in an afternoon, rather than a sales process that a merchant has to survive.[1][2]
There is no later degree, no management programme and no second institution in the record. The education that shaped the second half of his working life was the accelerator: Razorpay went through Y Combinator in the winter of 2015, and the discipline of building a product that a stranger can use without a sales call is the lesson the programme is organised around. The company has stayed close to that network since, and in 2026 it was Y Combinator's own Startup School in Bengaluru where he told the story of the early years to a hall of 2,500 people.[2][3]
Business career and companies
Razorpay is the only company Mathur has run, and it began with a problem he had hit himself. His account of the origin is deliberately unromantic: he had felt the difficulty of accepting a digital payment as a small business, he could not understand why nobody was fixing it, and he and Shashank Kumar set out to build the solution rather than describe it. The judgement they made in 2014 was that a payment gateway in India was gated behind paperwork, minimum volumes and long approval cycles, and that a self service product priced low enough for a very small seller would find a market the incumbents could not reach.[1][3]
The scale of that market was the thing he got wrong, in his own telling. In the application the two of them sent to Y Combinator in 2014 they wrote that India was a 60 billion dollar payments market. Speaking in 2026 he said that Razorpay alone now processes 180 billion dollars in payments volume, and that the company has surpassed every projection he made in its first decade. That admission is useful to anyone reading the history: the founder of one of India's largest payments companies built it while believing the opportunity was a third of the size it turned out to be.[3]
The career has one company and several businesses inside it. The gateway was first, the neo banking suite RazorpayX and the lending arm Razorpay Capital followed, and the suite has since widened to include checkout software, subscriptions, tax payments, corporate cards and cross border collection. The logic he has repeated for years is that the gateway is the entry point and the money management around it is the business, because a merchant who already settles payments through one company will buy the adjacent products from the same company if they are good enough.[1][4]
He has also built a second, smaller vehicle in his personal capacity. In 2021 he and other Razorpay executives, including his co-founder, set up MarsShot Ventures, an angel fund aimed at early stage Indian startups. The fund was not an arm of Razorpay and Mathur said so directly, because the investments were being made by the executives personally. By the time it was announced it had made about 15 investments, mostly at seed and pre Series A, and its portfolio included BimaPe, UrbanPiper and Hashnode. The instinct is the one a lot of Indian operators have: write small cheques in the ecosystem that produced you, and learn the next generation of companies from the inside.[8]
Razorpay: the payment gateway years
The first product was a checkout that a developer could wire into a site, and the first customers were the merchants a bank or a legacy gateway would not bother with: a small online store, a tutor taking fees online, a bootstrapped software company in a tier two city. Razorpay's pitch was that integration took hours rather than weeks, that there was no minimum volume, and that pricing was published rather than negotiated. The company has grown into a large enterprise vendor since, but the self service small seller is still the story it tells about where its volume comes from.[1][3]
The early years were not smooth, and the failure he cites most often is infrastructural rather than commercial. He has described a bank pulling its support in the company's early days, which for a payments business is close to an existential event, because the licence to move money sits with a partner rather than with the startup. His conclusion from that period is the argument he now makes to other founders: building inside a regulated space is an advantage precisely because most founders will not tolerate the difficulty of it. He has repeated the point in public sessions on regulatory patience, and it explains the company's later investment in licensing rather than in growth at any price.[3]
The decision that changed the company's trajectory was to embrace the Unified Payments Interface early. When the National Payments Corporation of India opened the real time rails in 2016, Razorpay added them for its merchants, and the pandemic then pushed a wave of offline businesses onto the same rails. In 2020 the company said it had onboarded seven lakh new small businesses, startups and freelancers in twelve months, that 54 per cent of its digital transaction volume came from small businesses in tier two and tier three cities, and that over 30 billion dollars had been processed on the platform. He set a target then of five million new small businesses in the following year, and of doubling the lending book from about 250 crore rupees a month to 500 crore rupees a month.[3][9]
UPI also created the economic question that still runs through Indian payments, and Mathur is now one of the people answering it in public. Because consumer transactions on UPI are free, the industry has argued that the cost of the infrastructure has to be recovered somewhere. In 2026 he and the chief executive of PhonePe both backed charges on transactions by large merchants while saying that ordinary users will keep paying nothing, a position aligned with the payments industry association. The same year the company said it would stay free for consumers whatever the regulator decided. Whatever the outcome, the founder of a gateway is unusually exposed to it: his business earns on merchant transactions, so the pricing of the rails is a direct input to his margins.[5][6]
RazorpayX, Capital and the business banking stack
The second half of Razorpay's strategy is the part Mathur talks about in the language of a founder who watched businesses die of cash flow rather than of competition. A merchant that collects money still has to pay salaries, vendors and taxes, and each of those jobs was served by a bank branch, a spreadsheet and a lot of patience. RazorpayX put a current account, payouts and vendor payments inside the same dashboard as the gateway, while Razorpay Capital offered short term working capital through partner banks and non banking finance companies, underwritten on the transaction history the gateway already held.[1][9]
The lending decision was not an obvious one. He described the lending product as an addition to the platform rather than its main driver, and the company started carefully, testing with about 100 merchants before a wider rollout. The discipline behind it is that Razorpay is not a lender on its own balance sheet: it uses partner institutions and prices loans off data it already owns, which is a lower risk model than carrying the credit itself, and one that only works because the gateway gives the company a view of a merchant's cash flows that a standalone lender does not have.[9][10]
How well that stack has done is visible in the last published financials. In the year to March 2025 Razorpay reported revenue from operations of about 3,783 crore rupees, up 65 per cent, and a net loss of about 1,209 crore rupees caused by a one time charge connected to moving the parent company to India rather than by the operating business. For a company that started as a checkout button for small sellers that is a large number, and it comes mostly from the merchants, subscriptions and businesses it added around the payment.[15]
The stack now extends past India as well. The company bought Curlec in Malaysia for its first overseas business, took a cross border payment aggregator licence from the Reserve Bank so that Indian businesses can collect from customers abroad, and won approval for an offline payment aggregator licence for its point of sale arm. For Mathur the argument is that India's real time payments lead is an exportable advantage: he told an audience in 2026 that many billion dollar fintech companies can emerge from India to serve global markets, on the strength of what Indian companies learned building on UPI at a scale no other market has matched.[4][6]
Building the company: hiring, culture and engineering
Mathur's public record on management is thinner than his record on strategy, but the hiring decisions are documented and they show how he built the company. In late 2019 Razorpay said it would expand its workforce by more than 65 per cent, adding 400 people by the middle of 2020, and appointed Arpit Chug, a former chief financial officer of American Express, as its own finance chief, the third senior hire in six months. The leadership below the founders at that point included Amitabh Tewary, previously a vice president at Mastercard, as chief innovation officer and Rahul Kothari, earlier at PayU, as chief business officer. The pattern is a founder who hires people who have already run the function at a larger company, and then hands them the function.[10]
The culture question he has answered himself, in the context that mattered to him: employee ownership. In 2018, three years after the accelerator, about 140 people at Razorpay sold their stock options to Tiger Global, its largest institutional investor, in a secondary deal struck at a 50 per cent premium to the previous funding round. The company's payroll was then about 250 people, so a majority of the staff took part, and the sale reached from team leaders to call centre staff rather than being reserved for the top of the organisation. Employee buybacks have since become a standard feature of the Indian startup playbook, and Razorpay was early to run one.[13]
He has also had to make the argument for control. In 2019, after a 75 million dollar round, the company amended its articles so that each of the two founders holds two votes per board seat while investors hold one each, which gives the pair four votes against the investors' three on every resolution, including the appointment or removal of a chief executive. It is an unusual arrangement for a company with American and Indian institutional investors on the register, and it was reported as a deliberate move to keep the founders in control of a business they had not yet listed.[7]
The engineering culture is the part of the company that has been hardest to see from outside, and the clearest public signal came in 2026 with the launch of an in house artificial intelligence model trained on four billion payments, built with Nvidia and Amazon Web Services. Mathur's framing of it is defensive as much as commercial: he has argued that if attackers use artificial intelligence to find weaknesses, companies have no choice but to use the same technology to defend themselves, and that traditional security testing by human beings cannot keep pace with automated attack.[5]
Net worth and wealth
No large publisher in the record states Harshil Mathur's personal net worth, and this entry does not print a figure for him. What the record carries instead is the value of the asset he owns a share of. Razorpay was valued at 7.5 billion dollars in November 2021, when TCV, Lone Pine Capital and Alkeon Capital led a 375 million dollar round, after having been valued at 3 billion dollars only eight months earlier, and the company had raised about 741.5 million dollars in equity by that point.[14]
The founder's wealth therefore has to be read rather than measured. He holds a stake built from the first days of the company, he and his co-founder amended the board rights so that their votes carry double weight, and the register behind them includes Tiger Global, Y Combinator, Matrix Partners, Mastercard, Sequoia India, GIC, Ribbit, TCV, Lone Pine and Alkeon. In a private company of that kind a founder's paper wealth moves with the next round and with the listing, and both of those are events rather than facts.[2][7][14]
The listing is the event that will convert the paper into a number. Razorpay filed confidential draft papers in 2026 to raise between 5,000 crore and 6,000 crore rupees, and the operating numbers a public market will judge it on are already published: revenue from operations of about 3,783 crore rupees in the year to March 2025, up 65 per cent, against a net loss of about 1,209 crore rupees that the company attributes to the one time cost of moving its parent to India. Until the shares trade, the honest position on the founder's personal fortune is that it is reported at nothing, because no one has reported it.[15]
Family and personal life
Mathur has kept his family out of his public life to an unusual degree for someone who runs a company this size. No publisher in the record names a wife, a partner or a child, and this entry states none of them. The most that can be said is that he was a young co-founder when the company started, that he was 25 when a newspaper photographed the firm's first proper office, and that he has been the public face of the business from that age without ever trading on his private life to promote it.[11]
The personal detail that exists is ordinary and was given voluntarily. Asked about his tastes in 2020, he named Chak De India, a film about an underdog sports team, as his favourite movie, and Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston as the book he would keep. He called North Indian food his comfort cuisine, chose the Apple Watch as the gadget he relies on, named CK Eternity among colognes, picked Kerala in India and Dubai abroad as the places he likes to travel, and said the television comedy Silicon Valley was funny precisely because it reflected the startup ecosystem he works in.[12]
One detail from the company's early years says more than the list does. When Razorpay moved into its first large office, an 11,000 square foot floor on Hosur Road in Bengaluru that housed 29 employees, Mathur explained the design as an attempt to keep a startup's fun without losing the seriousness of a financial firm, and pointed out that the office had no solid internal walls so that everyone could see every corner. His own favourite feature was the sleeping room, which he described as cosy and dimly lit, and said a short nap left him ready for the rest of the day. It is a small thing, but it describes a specific kind of company: one built by two young engineers who wanted to work late without pretending that working late was a virtue.[11]
His public position on intensity is correspondingly relaxed compared with the loudest voices in Indian startups. He has spoken about regulation slowing growth while rewarding patient founders, a phrase he used as a description of his own company's first decade, and the way he talks about endurance rather than speed is consistent with a founder who spent ten years in a regulated business instead of four years in a race for scale.[3]
Residence and property
Bengaluru is the only city the record attaches to him. Razorpay was founded there in 2014, its headquarters is still there, and every major decision in the company's history has been announced from Bengaluru, including the reverse flip to an Indian parent, the licence approvals and the listing preparation. The city is also where he appeared in 2026 for Y Combinator's first Startup School in India, which is the kind of event a founder attends because the local ecosystem is where his company's engineers come from.[1][3]
No publication in the record describes a home he owns, and this entry does not invent an address, a neighbourhood or a property portfolio, which is the sort of material that circulates for Indian founders without a source. The only accommodation the record does document is a workplace: the office on Hosur Road with the sleeping room, the gym and the recreation room, and his own note that the floor was chosen because the team could see the whole of it at once.[11]
Awards and recognition
The recognition that matters most to his own account of the company is the one he received as its chief executive at the ET Startup Awards in 2022, when Razorpay took the Startup of the Year award. The honour is a company award given to the founder who runs it, and it arrived at the point when Razorpay was among the most valuable private financial technology companies in the country.[14]
Beyond that, his standing in the industry is measured less by medals than by the platforms he is given. He speaks at the Global Fintech Fest, where he has argued that India's lead in real time payments should let Indian companies compete globally, and at Y Combinator's Startup School, where he told the story of building inside a regulated market to a hall of 2,500 founders. He is also one of the people the national press calls first when the pricing of the Unified Payments Interface is debated, which for a chief executive in his position is a form of recognition that no award confers.[3][4][5][6]
Philanthropy and angel investing
Mathur's documented giving is in the form of investing rather than donations. MarsShot Ventures, set up in 2021 with other senior Razorpay executives including Shashank Kumar, was created to put money into early stage Indian startups when the executives kept being approached for advice by founders. It was incorporated roughly six months before it was announced, had made around 15 investments by then, mostly at seed and pre Series A, and its portfolio has included BimaPe, UrbanPiper and Hashnode. The fund also said it was hiring an investment manager to run its day to day work, which is the step that separates a collection of angel cheques from an institution.[8]
The thinking behind it, in his own words, was that founders were approaching the Razorpay team for guidance and that the ones the team found interesting also got capital, as investments made in a personal capacity. That is a small but real transfer of experience from a company that had already navigated the licensing, banking and regulatory problems the next generation would meet, and it is the form of giving a founder of his type actually has: pattern recognition and a phone number.[8]
There is no family foundation, no large public donation and no charitable trust attached to his name in the record, and this entry does not claim one. What the record shows instead is a founder who has argued through his own company that the larger public good in Indian payments was financial inclusion for businesses rather than consumers, a point he made in interviews describing why Razorpay was built for merchants while most of the industry chased consumer wallets.[4][9]
Controversies and criticism
The scrutiny Mathur has faced in public is industry scrutiny rather than personal scandal. The first serious one was regulatory: the Reserve Bank granted Razorpay in principle approval for a payment aggregator licence and then asked it to pause onboarding new online merchants while the application was examined, a freeze that lasted close to a year and that hit the company's core growth engine while its competitors kept adding merchants. The licence was finally granted in December 2023, and the episode is part of why the company now invests so heavily in compliance and frames regulation as an advantage rather than an obstacle.[3][7]
The second is the pricing question that runs through Indian payments and in which he has taken a public side. He has backed charges on transactions by large merchants while insisting that consumer payments stay free, a position the payments industry association shares and that consumer groups and some merchants have questioned, since any charge on a merchant is eventually passed on somewhere. For a founder whose revenue depends on merchant transaction fees, the criticism that his position is self interested is not easy to answer, and he has answered it mainly by accepting the trade off openly.[5][6]
The third is the scale of the company's ambition, which invites the criticism that comes with being the incumbent. Razorpay is now a large vendor with a lending book, a corporate card, a point of sale arm and a cross border business, and it files for a listing while reporting a net loss of about 1,209 crore rupees. Whether a payments company should be running five businesses at once, or whether it should have been profitable as a gateway before building the rest, is a fair question and one public market investors will answer with the share price rather than in an interview.[4][15]
Reading the numbers
The numbers that define Mathur's company, with their years attached, are these. Razorpay raised 9 million dollars in October 2015 and 20 million dollars in January 2018, then 75 million dollars in June 2019, 100 million dollars in October 2020 at just over a billion dollars, 160 million dollars in April 2021 at 3 billion dollars, and 375 million dollars in November 2021 at 7.5 billion dollars, taking total equity raised to about 741.5 million dollars. The valuation moved by seven times in a little over a year.[7][13][14]
The operating numbers moved more slowly and are more informative. In 2020 the company said it had processed over 30 billion dollars and had onboarded seven lakh new small businesses in twelve months, with 54 per cent of digital transaction volume coming from tier two and tier three cities. By 2026 Mathur said Razorpay alone was processing 180 billion dollars in payments volume, against the 60 billion dollar estimate for the whole Indian market that he had written in his accelerator application eleven years earlier.[3][9]
The financials filed for the year to March 2025 are the first the company has had to defend in public: revenue from operations of about 3,783 crore rupees, up 65 per cent, and a net loss of about 1,209 crore rupees, of which the company says the large part is a one time charge from moving its parent to India. The revenue number is the one to watch, because it grew at a rate that would make the company profitable at scale if the cost base were stable, and the company has chosen to explain the loss rather than restate it away.[15]
For his own page the figures that matter are the two he has repeated in public: the 180 billion dollars of annual payment volume the company now handles, and the 7.5 billion dollar valuation of the last priced round in 2021, which the listing will either confirm or cut. Everything else about his personal fortune is a derivation from those two numbers, and the entry stops where the record stops.[3][14]
