Razorpay

Alumni Q&A

How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)

The founders, Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, met at IIT Roorkee, where they worked on projects together and co-founded the campus software development group SDS Labs; some code from that era still runs in Razorpay. After graduation Kumar joined Microsoft in the US and Mathur worked for Schlumberger in the Middle East, continuing side projects remotely. In 2014, difficulties accepting online payments while building a crowdsourcing donation platform exposed the gap for Indian startups and small businesses, leading them to start Razorpay. The company grew from 10,000 partner businesses in 2017 to over 5 million.

How did you decide to apply to Y Combinator? What was your experience applying, going through the batch, and fundraising at demo day?

The founders followed Hacker News and saw the YC application announcement a few months after starting on Razorpay, before the product had launched, and applied partly to force clarity on questions like differentiation, market size, and customer acquisition. They were accepted in late 2014, shortly after launching, and chose to spend the full three months in Mountain View rather than flying back and forth to Bangalore. Nine years later, Razorpay became YC's first Indian unicorn.

What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?

The founders started Razorpay in 2014 as a payment gateway aimed at Indian startups and small businesses, addressing the poor state of online payment acceptance. Observing that larger payment providers focused on big businesses while MSMEs lacked B2B payment infrastructure, the company later added the neo-banking platform RazorpayX and the lending platform Razorpay Capital to cover the full flow of money from acceptance to disbursal. Over eight years it expanded from a payment gateway into a full-stack financial services company. MSMEs are cited as India's second-largest employment sector after agriculture, contributing around 31% of GDP.

What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?

The founders' long-term aim is to change how payments and banking work for small businesses in India, offering payments and banking on a single platform so businesses spend less time on compliance and operations and more on building products and scaling. They want to make India more economically inclusive and see Indian fintech serving customers beyond India. The answer notes India as the third-largest fintech ecosystem with an 87% adoption rate.