Two IIT Roorkee Friends Got Tired of Broken Payment Forms — So They Built India's Payments Backbone. The Story of Razorpay.

In 2013, India's startup ecosystem was beginning to stir. New e-commerce ventures, new SaaS products, new small businesses were emerging across the country, all carrying the same basic need: a way to accept money from customers online. And every single one of them ran into the same wall.

Integrating a payment gateway into a website or app in India, at that time, was a genuinely miserable process. It involved complex documentation, opaque onboarding procedures with banks, lengthy approval timelines that could stretch for weeks, and technical integration that was poorly suited to the needs of small teams trying to move fast. For a startup trying to launch a product, the payment integration step was often the single most frustrating part of getting to market.

Harshil Mathur had graduated from IIT Roorkee in 2013 and briefly worked as a Wireline Field Engineer at Schlumberger, the global oilfield services company, before deciding that his real interest lay elsewhere. He had spent his college years involved in technology and entrepreneurship circles at IIT Roorkee, where he had also met Shashank Kumar — a fellow student who would become his closest collaborator and eventual co-founder. Shashank had gone on to work at Microsoft before the two reconnected around a shared frustration: the broken state of online payments in India.

Neither man's academic background was directly in finance or payments technology. What they shared instead was a willingness to look closely at a process that everyone in the Indian startup ecosystem complained about — and to actually try fixing it.

In December 2014, Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar founded Razorpay.

A Name That Was a Promise

The name itself was chosen deliberately. Razorpay was meant to signal precisely what the founders intended to deliver: razor-sharp speed and precision in payment processing — the opposite of the slow, cumbersome, paperwork-heavy systems that had frustrated them and every other Indian entrepreneur trying to accept money online.

The earliest version of the product was bootstrapped from Jaipur, where the founders built their first working version before relocating operations to Bangalore to access the city's deeper pool of engineering talent and its proximity to India's startup investment ecosystem. The company began with a strikingly small footprint — a single apartment housing an eleven-person team, working to build what would eventually become India's full-stack payments and banking infrastructure for businesses.

The founding insight that shaped Razorpay's earliest product decisions was developer-first design. Rather than building a payment gateway the way banks and legacy payment processors had always built them — slow, document-heavy, oriented around compliance teams rather than engineers — Razorpay built an API that developers could integrate quickly, with documentation that was clear and a sandbox environment that let engineers test before committing. This single decision — designing for the developer rather than for the back-office bank relationship manager — became the foundation of everything Razorpay built afterward.

Y Combinator and the Validation That Changed Everything

In 2015, Razorpay was accepted into Y Combinator's Winter batch — becoming one of only two India-focused companies selected for the prestigious Silicon Valley accelerator programme at that time. The acceptance brought $120,000 in seed funding and, perhaps more importantly, mentorship from Y Combinator partners including Paul Buchheit and Dalton Caldwell — individuals with deep experience in building and scaling technology companies.

The validation from Y Combinator mattered enormously for a company trying to convince Indian banks — institutions that were, by nature, cautious and risk-averse — to partner with a young startup attempting to simplify a process the banks themselves controlled. Early traction depended on Razorpay's ability to build a secure, scalable API that could win over sceptical banking partners while simultaneously onboarding thousands of merchants within months of building credibility.

By late 2015, Razorpay had raised a $9 million Series A round, co-led by Tiger Global and Matrix Partners — investors whose participation signalled growing confidence in the company's ability to capture a market segment that incumbent payment gateways had largely ignored: the long tail of startups and small and medium enterprises who needed a payments partner but had been treated as an afterthought by the established players.

The company scaled rapidly through 2016 and 2017 — growing from a handful of engineers to over 100 employees by 2017, and establishing a proper headquarters in Bangalore as the team and the ambition both expanded.

From Payment Gateway to Full-Stack Financial Infrastructure

In 2017, three years after its founding, Razorpay made a strategic transformation that repositioned the company entirely. It rebranded as Razorpay 2.0 — describing itself not merely as a payment gateway but as a Converged Payments Solution company, with a product suite designed to help businesses manage the full complexity of money flowing in and out of their financial systems.

This was a deliberate widening of ambition. A payment gateway processes transactions. A financial infrastructure company manages an entire business's relationship with money — collections, payouts, payroll, vendor payments, current accounts, lending, and more. Razorpay began building toward that broader vision, eventually launching RazorpayX, its business banking platform, designed to give companies — particularly startups and SMEs who had limited access to sophisticated banking tools — modern current account services, automated payroll, vendor payment management, and access to credit.

The expansion strategy worked. By 2020, Razorpay raised a $100 million Series D round, co-led by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC and Sequoia India, valuing the company at "a little more than $1 billion" according to CEO Harshil Mathur — making Razorpay an officially recognised unicorn, just six years after its founding. The round brought the company's total funding to $206.5 million at that point, with existing investors Ribbit Capital, Tiger Global, Y Combinator, and Matrix Partners all participating again.

Razorpay's investor base would go on to include more than 30 reputed investors, with backing from firms including Lone Pine Capital, Alkeon Capital, TCV, Sequoia Capital India, GIC, Ribbit Capital, Tiger Global Management, and Mastercard, across Series A through F funding rounds totalling over $741 million.

The Marketing Strategy That Made Founders the Heroes

Razorpay's marketing approach has been distinctive within Indian fintech for one consistent reason: rather than centring its brand narrative on its own product features, Razorpay has built its identity around celebrating the founders and entrepreneurs who use its platform — turning customer success into the core of its brand storytelling.

Razorpay Rize — building the next generation of founders, before they're customers. Razorpay Rize is a startup support programme specifically designed for early-stage and bootstrapped founders who have raised no more than $5 million in funding. Rather than waiting for startups to become large enough to need sophisticated payment infrastructure, Razorpay built a community — now exceeding 1,000 founders — offering mentorship, support for Y Combinator applications, incorporation services, and access to Razorpay's own leadership and infrastructure. This is a strategy that builds brand loyalty years before a transactional relationship even begins, embedding Razorpay into a founder's journey from the earliest possible stage.

The billboard that gives away free advertising. Perhaps the most distinctive single marketing gesture in Razorpay's history is its decision to turn the 20-foot digital billboard on the façade of its Koramangala headquarters in Bangalore — one of the city's busiest startup neighbourhoods — into permanent, free advertising space for other early-stage disruptive startups, rather than monetising the prime location for its own brand messaging. Every month, different startups are featured on this billboard, seen by thousands of people who pass through one of India's most concentrated startup hubs daily. It is, by its own positioning, one of the boldest gestures a unicorn company has made to spotlight a younger generation of entrepreneurs rather than promoting itself.

FTX — Razorpay's own flagship fintech event. Razorpay built and hosts FTX, an annual fintech event that has become one of the must-attend gatherings in the Indian fintech calendar. Within FTX, the Razorpay Rize programme takes centre stage, with showcase opportunities, panel discussions, and curated networking sessions that give early-stage founders visibility alongside established industry voices. By building its own flagship industry event rather than simply sponsoring others, Razorpay positioned itself as a convening institution within Indian fintech, not just a participant in it.

#ImaginedThroughAI — pioneering AI-generated brand storytelling. In May 2023, Razorpay launched what it described as India's first AI-powered print advertising campaign, partnering with Talented.Agency to create 45 unique AI-generated art pieces depicting the journeys of 45 different Indian founders, released sequentially over 45 days. The campaign was explicitly founder-first and founder-only — Razorpay's own branding was secondary to the storytelling about the entrepreneurs being honoured. This was both an early and notable use of generative AI in Indian advertising and a continuation of Razorpay's consistent strategy of making other people's stories central to its own brand narrative.

Venture investment as marketing and infrastructure combined. Razorpay Ventures, the company's venture investment arm focused on B2B software startups in India, offers founders more than capital — including auto-enrolment into the Razorpay Rize founder network, access to Razorpay's technology stack and sandbox environment, mentorship, and benefits worth a stated $300,000 in credits and services. This blending of investment, product access, and community support reflects a marketing philosophy built on long-term relationship building rather than conventional advertising spend.

Where Razorpay Stands Today

Razorpay has grown from its eleven-person apartment beginnings into what it describes as India's leading full-stack payments and banking platform for businesses, serving merchants ranging from early-stage bootstrapped startups to large enterprises. The company's product suite now spans payment gateway services, business banking through RazorpayX, payroll management, lending solutions, and more — built on the same developer-first philosophy that defined its earliest API.

India itself has become one of the most significant startup ecosystems in the world — ranked third on the Hurun Global Unicorn Index 2025, behind only the United States and China. Razorpay has positioned itself not merely as a vendor serving this ecosystem, but as an active participant in building it — through Rize, through Ventures, through FTX, and through a marketing philosophy that has, since its earliest days, treated the success of Indian founders as inseparable from its own.

From a Frustrating Payment Form to India's Financial Backbone

Razorpay's story began with two friends from IIT Roorkee who were tired of watching businesses struggle with something that should have been simple: accepting money from their own customers. They did not set out to build a brand built on celebrity endorsements or splashy advertising campaigns. They built an API that worked, and then they built a company culture and a marketing philosophy that consistently pointed the spotlight toward the founders and businesses using their platform rather than toward themselves.

From a single apartment in 2014 to a unicorn valuation in 2020, from $120,000 in Y Combinator seed funding to $741.5 million raised across multiple rounds, from frustrated entrepreneurs filling out endless bank paperwork to over a thousand founders inside the Razorpay Rize community — the company that started by solving a tedious integration problem has become genuine infrastructure for how India does business online.

The razor-sharp precision the name promised in 2014 is still, more than a decade later, exactly what the company has tried to deliver.

Founded December 2014. Y Combinator Winter 2015. Unicorn status 2020. $741.5 million raised. Built by founders, for founders.