How Razorpay Became India’s Largest Payments Company
In a Nutshell
Razorpay, India's largest payments company, grew from a YC-backed startup in 2015 by solving painful digital payment integration for Indian startups, pivoting from education to co-working spaces, enduring regulatory delays and near-death bank shutdowns through relentless customer trust via human support, and betting early on UPI ahead of competitors. Capital-efficient growth (40x pre-pandemic with near-zero burn), deep customer conviction, and founder ownership of product vision fueled compounding success, while recent AI reinvention enables faster adaptation in a commoditizing market. Key lesson: Build moats in regulated spaces, prioritize daily value over growth hype, and stay in "founder mode" for 10-year problems you're obsessed with.
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B2B is a business of trust and nothing replaces the human touch point of trust. Picking up the phone and having a human on the other side saying "yes I am with you I am managing it" gives a lot of trust.
Razorpay went through Y Combinator (YC) in winter 2015, the first Indian company YC invested in. It is now India's largest payments platform, grown at breakneck pace. Early struggles offer lessons for founders.
Harshil was a techie who loved coding from school and college. Had no idea about finance or payments before starting Razorpay. After graduating from IIT, got placed in an oil company in the Middle East, didn't enjoy it. Spent weekends and evenings coding side projects. Built a social crowdfunding platform needing payments. Standard bank channels were complicated to accept payments in India—hard to get started, poor experience not built for techies but for large companies.
Typical techie mentality: how hard could this be?
Realized it seemed like a simple problem nobody was solving. Checked Bangalore startups, Facebook groups—everyone had the same problem. Easier to accept cash than digital payments in India, reversing democratization (social media gives voice, internet channels, e-commerce selling points).
If I knew what I knew today, maybe I would not have started.
Wanted to build online payments. Chose education institutes because e-commerce seemed smaller/harder; education had large fees payments mostly physical/non-digital. Applied to YC pitching payments for education institutes.
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