Razorpay co-founder Harshil Mathur identified an early niche in India's online payments market, enabling small businesses to grow. Now competitors are hot on his heels
Razorpay co-founder and CEO Harshil Mathur
Harshil Mathur knew the odds were stacked against him and his college pal Shashank Kumar when they pitched a new online payment gateway for small businesses to suited-up bankers a decade ago. Mathur, then 23, had a mechanical engineering degree, a fondness for T-shirts and no experience in finance. “Initially, we felt like we were not being taken seriously,” says Razorpay’s chief executive.
The pair were turned down by nearly 100 banks; all were wary about partnering with an unknown fintech in a field with stringent security protocols. They finally got a break when banking giant HDFC agreed to roll out their gateway—but the co-founders had to come up with a security deposit of ₹2.5 million, roughly $40,000 at the time. They didn’t have that kind of cash, having stumped up ₹1 million to launch the company, so Kumar’s grandfather chipped in part of his life savings. “Everything was a challenge in the beginning,” reflects Mathur.
Over the next decade, they hustled, beefing up online payment options for customers and adding merchant-friendly services such as international and real-time payments, digital banking and lending services and point-of-sale machines for in-store purchases to the mix. To round it out, they bought eight companies—all but one in India—spanning a payroll-management firm, an AI-powered fraud detection platform and a digital invoice company.
Those efforts paid off. Today Bengaluru-based Razorpay operates one of India’s largest payment gateways by revenue and transaction volume and counts 86 of the country’s top 100 unicorns by value among its customers. Sales in the year ended March 2024 climbed nearly 10 percent to ₹25 billion ($300 million) as total payments volume hit ₹15 billion, up from ₹12.6 billion a year earlier.
Razorpay’s last funding round in 2021, which brought total funds raised to nearly $742 million, valued the Delaware-registered company at $7.5 billion. (They chose the US to be closer to the bulk of their investors.) As per recently disclosed information about their stakes, both Mathur, who featured in the 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2021, and Kumar are billionaires with a net worth of about $1 billion each.
(This story appears in the 11 July, 2025 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)