Razorpay's Quiet Rewiring of Indian Payments

In 2014, two engineers from IIT Roorkee went knocking on banks with a payments API and a pitch almost nobody wanted to hear. A decade on, the company they built moves more than $150 billion through the Indian economy every year, counts over 12 million businesses as customers, and is now filing to go public. The distance between those two facts is the Razorpay story. It reads less as a lucky break than as a stubborn, unglamorous bet that the plumbing of Indian commerce was worth rebuilding from the developer outward.

An API most banks wouldn't meet

When Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar started out, accepting a card payment online in India was a small ordeal. Incumbent gateways asked would-be merchants for physical offices, operational history, hefty security deposits and steep set-up fees, then handed them a clunky integration that took weeks to wire up. The founders' wager was that a small business or a solo developer should be able to start taking money in an afternoon.

Getting anyone to underwrite that was the hard part. By their own account they were turned away close to 100 times before a bank agreed to work with them, and investors were no warmer in the early days. The turn came in 2015, when Razorpay became one of the first India-focused startups admitted to Y Combinator. The accelerator gave them a template, a network, and enough credibility to get calls returned back home.

Treating the API as the product

The company's founding insight was narrow and, at the time, contrarian. Most payment firms sold to finance teams and treated the code as an afterthought. Razorpay inverted that. Clean documentation, a few lines to integrate, and a checkout that simply worked became the whole proposition. The customer they optimised for was the engineer doing the integration, not the CFO signing the contract.

The founders were explicit that the API was the product and the developer the customer — and much of what Razorpay became was a consequence of that single choice.

That focus compounded. Once Razorpay owned the payment moment inside thousands of Indian apps and websites, it had a natural claim on everything adjacent to it. It built out RazorpayX, a business-banking layer for current accounts, payouts and payroll; added lending and capital products; and pushed into point-of-sale and international payments. The developer-first gateway became, over roughly a decade, a full-stack financial back office for Indian companies.

The grind, and a Rs 1,200-crore tax bill

Scale did not make the story tidy. In FY25 Razorpay's revenue from operations rose about 65% to roughly Rs 3,783 crore, up from around Rs 2,296 crore the year before. Yet the company still posted a consolidated net loss of about Rs 1,209 crore for the year, weighed down by employee stock-option expenses and one-time restructuring costs. Management has said the core online-payments business is now EBITDA-positive and throwing off cash, with the reported loss driven by the accounting rather than the underlying engine.

A large slice of that pain was self-inflicted, and deliberately so. Ahead of a domestic listing, Razorpay reverse-flipped its parent company from the United States back to India, completed in 2025. Redomiciling triggered a one-time tax outlay of roughly Rs 1,250 crore, in the region of $150 million, paid out of internal reserves. It is an expensive way to change your registered address, but a necessary one to list on an Indian exchange.

Prepping for the public markets

The endgame is now visible. Razorpay has converted into a public limited company, secured shareholder approval for a fresh issue reportedly worth around Rs 2,700 crore, and moved toward a listing via a confidential draft filing with SEBI. Reports put the overall IPO in the region of Rs 5,000-6,000 crore, with the company reportedly pitched at a valuation below its private peak of about $7.5 billion, set in its 2021 Series F. In other words, a public debut at a reset price rather than a coronation.

• Founded 2014; two IIT Roorkee co-founders, Harshil Mathur (CEO) and Shashank Kumar (MD).
• More than $150 billion in annualised total payment volume; over 12 million businesses on the platform.
• Roughly $742 million raised across its private life, from backers including Tiger Global, GIC, TCV and Peak XV.
• Reverse-flipped to India in 2025 at a one-time tax cost of about Rs 1,250 crore, now IPO-bound.

The takeaway

Razorpay's lesson is not that persistence pays, though 100 rejections certainly test it. It is that a sharply chosen customer can carry a company for a decade. By deciding early that the developer was the buyer and the API was the product, the founders picked a wedge narrow enough to win and deep enough to expand from. The banking, lending and payroll businesses were not a pivot; they were the reward for owning one small, essential moment better than anyone else. For founders, the discipline worth copying is the restraint at the start, not the sprawl at the end.