Shashank Kumar’s decision to walk away from a comfortable Microsoft job is the reason a small business owner in Kanyakumari can now accept dollar payments without thinking twice about it, and why a Bengaluru startup can run its entire payroll without ever stepping into a bank. Ten years ago, none of that was baseline functionality — it barely existed at all. The story of how India’s digital payments infrastructure grew up is, in large part, the story of Razorpay.
Kumar himself is an unlikely central character for a fintech giant. An introverted kid from Patna who spent his childhood solving math puzzles and writing BASIC programs, he eventually built a platform that now sits underneath the financial lives of over 12 million merchants.
Going from a single-room startup in 2014 to a profitable company processing $180 billion in annualized total payment volume by 2025 isn’t an accident — it takes a stubborn focus on developer experience, some well-timed acquisitions, a co-founder partnership that actually held together under pressure, and a willingness to simplify a system everyone else assumed had to stay complicated.
Here’s how Kumar and his co-founder went from engineers with no fintech background to running one of India’s most consequential companies, including the regulatory setbacks and public controversies that tested the business along the way.
Table of Contents
- The Origin: From IIT Roorkee to Fixing the “Dismal State” of Payments
- Building the Moat: The Y Combinator Boost and Developer-First Strategy
- Beyond the Gateway: The Shift to a Full-Stack Financial System
- The Kumar–Mathur Partnership: Two Founders, One Company
- When Regulation Bites: The 2022 RBI Freeze and the Alt News Controversy
- The Numbers: Scale, Valuation, and the Road to Profitability
- The IPO Horizon and What Comes Next
- The Verdict: Decoding the Success
- Frequently Asked Questions
The Origin: From IIT Roorkee to Fixing the “Dismal State” of Payments
Kumar’s technical instincts showed up early. Raised in Patna by a bank manager father, he was writing programs by age 12 and building JavaScript calculators in high school — the kind of kid who found systems more interesting than most people do. That curiosity carried him to IIT Roorkee, where he met Harshil Mathur, his eventual co-founder, through a coding club the two of them started as undergrads. After graduating, Kumar headed to the US as a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft, while Mathur took a job as a wireline field engineer at Schlumberger in the Middle East.
Distance didn’t stop them from tinkering on side projects together. In 2014, they tried building a crowdfunding platform and ran straight into a wall: setting up a payment gateway in India back then was a slow, painful process, built on outdated APIs and paperwork that clearly favored large enterprises over anyone small.
It didn’t take long to realize the friction wasn’t unique to their project — it was choking the entire Indian startup ecosystem. So they pivoted. Kumar left Microsoft, Mathur left Schlumberger, and with no real background in financial services between them, the two set out to build something cleaner: a payment gateway developers would actually want to use.
Key Takeaway: Razorpay wasn’t born out of some grand ambition to build a fintech giant. It came from frustration with one specific, painfully high-friction problem.
Building the Moat: The Y Combinator Boost and Developer-First Strategy
The early days were genuinely rough — nearly 100 banks and investors said no before anything turned around, and Mathur has said openly that the pair “were not being taken seriously” pitching a payments company in T-shirts with no finance background. Their first real break came when HDFC Bank agreed to work with them, though the founders still had to scrape together a security deposit of roughly ₹25 lakh to get the partnership off the ground.
Things shifted decisively in 2015, when Razorpay became one of only two India-focused companies accepted into Y Combinator’s W15 batch. That single validation mattered enormously. It unlocked seed funding from YC and Tiger Global, and eventually pulled in heavyweight backers like Sequoia (now Peak XV), GIC, Ribbit Capital, and Mastercard, with total funding across rounds eventually crossing $740 million.
As CTO at the time, Kumar built the company’s early growth around one simple idea: make integration effortless. Most payment gateways leaned on sales teams to close deals. Razorpay leaned on documentation good enough that developers barely needed to talk to anyone.
That developer-first instinct turned into a distribution strategy almost by accident. A developer who wired up Razorpay for a weekend side project would, a few years later, be the person making platform decisions at a funded startup — and they’d bring Razorpay along with them.
Shashank’s philosophy: “The only things that matter in the early days are a clear problem to solve and a relentless focus on execution.”
Beyond the Gateway: The Shift to a Full-Stack Financial System
By 2017, the company had rebranded internally as “Razorpay 2.0” — not a cosmetic change, but a real signal that Kumar saw payments processing as just the plumbing. Businesses, he’d realized, needed a much wider financial toolkit than a gateway alone could offer.
What followed was a fairly aggressive expansion. RazorpayX brought neobanking into the mix — vendor payouts, payroll, treasury management. Razorpay Capital started offering working capital loans, using merchant transaction data as the underwriting signal. The acquisition of Ezetap pushed the company into offline point-of-sale systems, and picking up Curlec gave it a foothold for a genuinely international gateway, starting in Malaysia. More recently, in January 2026, Razorpay secured a payment aggregator cross-border license from the RBI, letting it move money across more than 130 currencies in over 180 countries — a step that put international clients like Airbnb, Agoda, and Shopify more firmly inside its reach.
Key Takeaway: Razorpay’s 94% merchant retention rate isn’t a coincidence. Once a business plugged in the payment gateway, there was simply no obvious reason left to look elsewhere for banking, payroll, or lending.
The Shahank Kumar–Harshil Mathur Partnership: Two Founders, One Company
It’s easy to tell Razorpay’s story as a solo journey, but that’s not quite accurate. Harshil Mathur is Razorpay’s CEO and the public face of the company — he sets overall vision, strategy, and fundraising direction. Kumar, meanwhile, has held the title of co-founder and Managing Director since transitioning out of the CTO role in 2022, focusing more on long-term product direction and global expansion while staying close to the engineering culture he built the company on.
The split has held up for over a decade largely because the two divide labor along genuine strengths rather than ego. Mathur is generally described as the outward-facing strategist, comfortable pitching bankers and investors even when, in the earliest days, neither founder had the résumé to be taken seriously. Kumar is the quieter, more technical half of the pair, the one who obsessed over API documentation when most of the industry still assumed a sales team was the only way to win enterprise clients.
Both are now billionaires on paper, with the Hurun Global Rich List placing their combined net worth north of ₹8,600 crore. But by most accounts, including their own public comments, neither founder has drifted far from the engineering-first instincts that got the company here — a rarer thing than it sounds like, a decade and multiple funding rounds in.
When Regulation Bites: The 2022 RBI Freeze and the Alt News Controversy
Razorpay’s growth hasn’t been friction-free, and its own executives have been candid about that. In July 2022, the company received in-principle approval for a payment aggregator license from the RBI — a milestone moment, on paper. Five months later, in December 2022, the RBI abruptly barred Razorpay, along with peers like Cashfree, Stripe, Paytm, and PayU, from onboarding any new merchants until they secured full licensing. The freeze lasted a full year; Razorpay didn’t get the green light to resume new user acquisition until December 2023.
Mathur has since described that period less as a crisis than as a forced pause — the company used the year to build out new products rather than merchant acquisition, since payments remained its core revenue engine regardless. Both founders have also been notably measured about India’s fintech regulatory regime in public, with Mathur arguing that RBI oversight is ultimately good for the industry’s long-term credibility, even when it slows a specific company down.
The company also found itself in a more uncomfortable spotlight in mid-2022, when Delhi Police investigating the fact-checking outlet Alt News subpoenaed transaction data tied to donations the outlet had received through Razorpay from several countries, including Pakistan and Syria. Mathur said publicly at the time that complying with the legal request was a requirement, not a choice — a reminder that as a regulated payments company, Razorpay doesn’t have full discretion over how it responds to law enforcement demands, whatever the politics of a given case.
Neither episode derailed the business, but both are useful correctives to a pure growth narrative: operating as critical financial infrastructure means Razorpay answers to regulators and courts in ways that pure software companies generally don’t.
The Numbers: Scale, Valuation, and the Road to Profitability
Razorpay’s business model is, at its heart, an exercise in scale — each transaction generates a sliver of revenue, and at high enough volume, slivers add up to an empire.
Total payment volume hit roughly $180 billion annualized by early 2025, with the company reportedly targeting $400 billion by 2030. It now commands somewhere around 55% of India’s online payment gateway market, and some accounts put its share of all internet payments processed in India above 30% — a remarkable position for a company that started with zero fintech experience between its two founders.
FY24 marked a genuine milestone — the company turned profitable, posting ₹2,501 crore in operating revenue against ₹34 crore in profit after tax. FY25 pushed consolidated revenue up to ₹3,783 crore, though a strategic net loss showed up on paper that year too, largely a byproduct of ESOP costs and a reverse-flip tax as the company shifted its domicile back to India.
On valuation, the company peaked at $7.5 billion during its Series F round in 2021. More recent analyses tied to a reported Series G round put the figure at $9.2 billion, driven by consistent revenue growth and the credibility that comes with sustained profitability.
The IPO Horizon and What Comes Next
To prepare for a public listing, Razorpay executed a complex “reverse flip,” moving its official domicile from Delaware — chosen originally to be closer to its US-heavy investor base — back to India. A confidential Draft Red Herring Prospectus filed with SEBI in mid-2026 reportedly targets a raise of ₹5,000 to ₹6,000 crore, which would make it one of the larger fintech IPOs India has seen. If the listing proceeds roughly as reported, it would arrive in late 2026, closing out more than a decade as a private company.
The domicile shift itself says something about where Razorpay expects its future growth to come from. Both founders have pointed to a growing number of Indian businesses built for global customers from day one, and a matching wave of global platforms — Airbnb, Shopify, Klook, and others among them — choosing to route Indian payments through Razorpay’s rails rather than building their own local infrastructure from scratch.
The Verdict: Decoding the Success
Going from writing basic games in Patna to running the technical backbone of Indian e-commerce is, honestly, a fairly rare arc. Kumar stepped back from the CTO role in 2022 to become Managing Director, shifting his focus toward long-term vision and global expansion — but the engineering instincts he started with never really left the company. Just as important, the partnership with Mathur held together through a decade of investor rejections, a year-long regulatory freeze, and a public data-privacy controversy, none of which is a given for co-founder relationships at this scale.
Razorpay didn’t win by being India’s first payment gateway. It won by being the first one that actually cared about the friction developers were dealing with — and by treating regulatory scrutiny as a cost of doing business in payments rather than an obstacle to fight. By quietly absorbing the regulatory and technical mess of Indian banking on behalf of everyone else, Kumar, Mathur, and their team turned Razorpay into the kind of infrastructure nobody notices — until it’s powering your Swiggy order or your CRED payment in the background.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did Shashank Kumar do before starting Razorpay?
He graduated with a Computer Science degree from IIT Roorkee and worked as a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft in the US.
How did the idea for Razorpay come about?
Kumar and co-founder Harshil Mathur set out in 2014 to build a crowdfunding platform. Integrating a payment gateway for it in India turned out to be so difficult that they abandoned the original idea and built a better, developer-friendly gateway instead.
Is Shashank Kumar the CEO of Razorpay?
No. Harshil Mathur is Razorpay’s CEO. Kumar co-founded the company alongside Mathur and currently serves as Managing Director, having moved out of the CTO role in 2022.
What happened with Razorpay and the RBI in 2022?
Razorpay received in-principle approval for a payment aggregator license in July 2022, but the RBI barred it — along with several other fintechs — from onboarding new merchants that December, pending full licensing. The freeze lasted until December 2023.
What is Razorpay’s current valuation?
It was valued at $7.5 billion during its Series F round in December 2021. More recent estimates from 2025–2026, tied to a reported Series G round and the push toward an IPO, put it closer to $9.2 billion.
Is Razorpay a profitable company?
Yes. FY24 was its first fully profitable year, with ₹34 crore in profit after tax on ₹2,501 crore in operating revenue.
What is the difference between Razorpay and RazorpayX?
Razorpay is the core payment gateway, used to accept payments online. RazorpayX is the neobanking layer built on top of it — vendor payouts, corporate cards, automated payroll, and treasury management.
