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For online businesses to win trust, Razorpay Payment Gateway is a must
In 2013–14, Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar were not trying to build Razorpay.
The IIT Roorkee alumni were working on a crowdfunding platform when they encountered a problem that would change the direction of their careers: accepting online payments in India was painfully complicated.
Payment gateways demanded paperwork, deposits, physical offices and lengthy onboarding processes. For startups and small businesses, the technology was equally frustrating.
The founders later described the existing experience as a major problem for startups and SMEs. Their conclusion was simple: if businesses were struggling to accept money online, perhaps the payment infrastructure itself needed to change.
And so, the crowdfunding idea was abandoned.
Razorpay was born in 2014.
The answer was technology.
The founders wanted payments to work more like the developer-friendly products emerging in Silicon Valley—but built specifically for India's regulatory and banking environment.
When Razorpay launched publicly through Y Combinator in 2015, its proposition was remarkably straightforward: give businesses a simple interface and APIs through which they could accept payments without wrestling with complicated infrastructure.
Harshil Mathur explained the problem bluntly in a 2015 Hacker News discussion:
“The payments in India are much more complex than USA and Europe…”
He pointed to strict regulations, multiple payment methods and unreliable bank gateways as some of the reasons payment failures and onboarding were so difficult.
That became Razorpay's opening.
Not exactly.
One of the most revealing chapters came when the founders built a digital fee-payment solution for schools. They spent around three to four months travelling by motorcycle and pitching the product to schools.
The result?
Almost nobody wanted it.
Only one school agreed to buy.
For a young startup, it was the kind of moment that could have ended the story.
But something unexpected happened. Startups from Jaipur's Startup Oasis began using Razorpay's payment gateway without the founders aggressively selling to them. These companies were looking for exactly what Razorpay was building: quick onboarding, simple integration and accessible support.
The founders discovered an important lesson: sometimes the market tells you what your product should become.
Razorpay eventually realised that collecting money was only one part of a business's financial problem.
Businesses also needed to send money, manage cash flows, automate payouts, collect recurring payments and handle other financial operations.
So Razorpay expanded.
Products such as RazorpayX pushed the company beyond payment acceptance and towards business banking and financial infrastructure. The company describes its evolution as a journey from a single-product payment gateway to a full-stack platform covering payments and banking.
The philosophy was captured by the founders themselves:
“Businesses can no longer think of digitization as an afterthought!”
The ambition was no longer simply to process a transaction.
It was to manage the movement of money around a business.
The scale is dramatically different from those early motorcycle sales meetings.
Razorpay says it now serves more than 8 million businesses.
For FY2025, its consolidated revenue reached ₹3,783 crore, a 65% increase from ₹2,296 crore in FY2024. Gross profit rose 41% to ₹1,277 crore. However, the company reported a ₹1,209 crore loss, substantially affected by employee stock-option expenses and costs associated with moving its parent company back to India.
Its scale is also visible in transaction volume: reports in 2026 put its annual payment-processing volume at roughly $180 billion.
The company is no longer thinking only about Indian checkout pages.
Razorpay has expanded into offline payments, business banking, cross-border payments, corporate cards and AI-powered financial products. In 2025, it received the RBI's Payment Aggregator–Cross Border licence, strengthening its ability to facilitate international payments.
And there is another major chapter unfolding.
In June 2026, Razorpay confidentially filed draft papers for an IPO reportedly targeting around $600 million in fundraising.
From two engineers struggling to integrate a payment gateway for a crowdfunding project to a company processing billions of dollars in transactions, Razorpay's journey illustrates a powerful startup principle:
Sometimes the biggest companies are hiding inside the problems nobody wants to solve.
Razorpay didn't begin by asking, “How do we build a billion-dollar fintech company?”
It began with a much smaller question:
“Why is it so difficult for an Indian business to simply get paid?”
