Latest news with #HarshilMathur
Time of India
29-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Razorpay completes reverse flip from US to India with MCA approval
Digital payments company Razorpay has informed its Board of Directors that it has completed the reverse flip of its parent entity from the US to India. According to filings seen by ET, the Regional Director, Southeast Region, for the Ministry of Corporate Affairs has approved the merger between Razorpay Inc. and Razorpay software Private Limited, which is based in Bengaluru. A Razorpay spokesperson confirmed the development. The company had applied to the regulators for the reverse flip under amended rules, which do not require companies to apply to the NCLT. Razorpay needed approval from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and eventually a nod from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. ET had reported on April 17 that Razorpay had also received the board's nod to convert itself into a public limited company , taking it one step closer to getting listed on Indian stock exchanges. Live Events Razorpay follows in the footsteps of another fintech company, Groww, which also reverse flipped its parent entity from the US to India in May 2024. Groww has now filed for an IPO with market regulator Sebi, opting for the confidential route. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories Speaking with ET, Harshil Mathur, chief executive officer of Razorpay, had said the company is looking to become profitable by 2026 and eventually go public. Razorpay processes around $180 billion in merchandise value every year. Its payments business reported revenue of Rs 2,500 crore in FY24 and a net profit of Rs 34 crore. Razorpay's overall business continued to report losses.
Forbes
14-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Indian Fintech Billionaire Harshil Mathur Races To Stay Ahead Of Payment Giants
Forbes Asia Harshil Mathur knew the odds were stacked against him and his college pal Shashank Kumar when they pitched a new online payment gateways for small businesses to suited-up bankers a decade ago. Mathur, then 23, had a mechanical engineering degree, a fondness for T-shirts and no experience in finance. 'Initially we felt like we were not being taken seriously,' says Razorpay's chief executive. The pair were turned down by nearly 100 banks; all were wary about partnering with an unknown fintech in a field with stringent security protocols. They finally got a break when banking giant HDFC agreed to roll out their gateway—but the cofounders had to come up with a security deposit of 2.5 million rupees, roughly $40,000 at the time. They didn't have that kind of cash, having stumped up 1 million rupees to launch the company, so Shashank's grandfather chipped in part of his life savings. 'Everything was a challenge in the beginning,' reflects Mathur. Over the next decade, they hustled, beefing up online payment options for customers and adding merchant-friendly services such as international and real-time payments, digital banking and lending services and point-of-sale machines for in-store purchases to the mix. To round it out, they bought eight companies—all but one in India—spanning a payroll-management firm, an AI-powered fraud detection platform and a digital invoice company. Those efforts paid off. Today Bangalore-based Razorpay operates one of India's largest payment gateways by revenue and transaction volume and counts 86 of the country's top 100 unicorns among its customers. Sales in the year ended March 2024 climbed nearly 10% to 25 billion rupees ($300 million) as total payments volume hit 15 billion rupees, up from 12.6 billion rupees a year earlier. Fiscal year ends March 31 Razorpay's last funding round in 2021, which brought total funds raised to nearly $742 million, valued the Delaware-registered company at $7.5 billion. (They chose the U.S. to be closer to the bulk of their investors.) As per recently disclosed information about their stakes, both Mathur, who featured in the 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2021, and Kumar are billionaires with a net worth of about $1 billion each. Now, as more competitors charge into their fiefdom, including global payments giants PayPal and PayU and domestic players such as Bangalore-based PhonePe and Cashfree Payments, they're readying for a massive scale-up. In the next five years, they want to more than triple the number of end users to a billion and sales to 84 billion rupees. 'Growth trumps everything,' declares Mathur. 'There are a lot more laps to be run.' Part of that plan is getting a significant chunk of India's burgeoning payments market, where the value of total transactions processed is projected to more than double to $76 trillion in fiscal 2031 from an estimated $37 trillion this year, according to Hyderabad-based market advisory firm Mordor Intelligence. 'This is a reachable goal given the kind of products…and focus that we have, and the pace at which the digital economy is growing,' says Kumar, Razorpay's managing director. Razorpay gets more than 70% of its revenue from payment-processing fees charged to merchants in India, which average around 1.75% per transaction, depending on the payment method used (such as credit or debit card, digital wallet, cardless payment or bank transfer). That compares with around 1.75% to 2.5% per transaction charged by rivals, according to industry data. While over 70% of its 5 million clients—the bulk are startups and small businesses—use two or more products, the company is leaning into new sales with fresh offerings like R.A.Y. (Razorpay Assistant for You), an on-demand AI 'concierge' that can generate intelligent insights for payments customers. Razorpay's net profit was up nearly fivefold to 340 million rupees in fiscal 2024 from 73 million a year earlier, powered by double-digit growth (24%) in its payment gateway business. Banking and lending aren't yet in the black, but are growing at a much faster rate, with Mathur anticipating that 'as the payments business scales, it will fund the other businesses, which will eventually become profitable.' To boost its top line, the company is pressing ahead with its ambitions for Southeast Asia, estimating that by 2030 the region will account for 15% of total revenue. Its first stop was Malaysia, where Razorpay acquired Kuala Lumpur-based payments company Curlec for $20 million in 2022. Source: RBI and Mordor Intelligence More recently, in March it set up an office in Singapore that focuses on real-time payments and cross-border transactions—which make up a third of online payments by Singapore businesses, Razorpay estimates. It projects the city-state's e-commerce market will double to $40 billion by 2028 from $20 billion in 2025. 'We want to grow with them,' says Mathur, adding that the company plans to enter the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam in the next four years. Still, staying ahead of competition is far from assured, cautions Ramita Sen, lead technology analyst at Mordor Intelligence, by email. 'All these [industry] players are providing robust, scalable and secure payment solutions tailored to meet diverse merchant requirements.' Shashank Kumar, cofounder and managing director of Razorpay. Mathur and Kumar first met at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, where the undergrads founded a coding club together. After he graduated in 2013, Mathur was working as a field engineer with a global energy company in Dubai when he got a call from Kumar, then a Microsoft software engineer living in the U.S., who pitched the idea of building a crowdfunding platform for social causes. They began to work on the project in their spare time, and soon came to realize a big problem that small online businesses faced: making and processing digital payments. They pivoted to building a secure payments platform for startups, which positioned Razorpay to grow alongside its clients such as food-delivery company Zomato and multiplex operator PVR Inox (previously PVR Cinemas). 'We literally took a call in the middle of the night to support the small businesses because they needed the money more.' Small companies remain at the heart of their business, Mathur insists. In 2020, when the Reserve Bank of India capped deposit withdrawals at troubled lender Yes Bank for two weeks to prevent a run on deposits, about 30% of Razorpay's merchant funds were locked in. 'We could either do settlements for the top ten largest customers or for 20,000 small customers,' recalls Mathur. They chose the latter: 'We literally took a call in the middle of the night to support the small businesses because they needed the money more.' As Razorpay presses ahead, investors are looking for sustained momentum. 'Think of this as a 50-lap race,' says Ishaan Mittal, managing director of VC firm Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital), which participated in four funding rounds. 'They have done their first five or seven laps,' he says, 'but there are a lot more laps to be run.' Mathur says he's preparing Razorpay to go public in the next three to five years, with plans to move its headquarters to Bangalore, where the cofounders currently reside. That's no mean feat: It needs to obtain regulatory clearances in India while capital gains taxes in the U.S. could cost as much as $300 million. 'A small price to pay,' he avers. 'This is our home market.' Check out our full Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2025 list here.
Forbes
14-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
A Decade Of 30 Under 30 Asia: Meet Some Of The Most Successful Alumni
Forbes Asia Lisa Thai rapper and singer Lalisa Manobal, better known as Lisa of Korean K-pop girl group Blackpink, has been charting her own path. Her latest turn is in the third season of hit HBO series The White Lotus in which she plays the role of Mook, who works at a Koh Samui resort. In April, she appeared at the Coachella music festival to perform songs from her debut studio album Alter Ego, released in February. The album's lead single 'Rockstar,' which she first released last year, climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard Global ranking of top songs outside the U.S. That followed a solo deal with Sony Music Entertainment's RCA Records and the launch of her own management label Lloud. In 2023, her track 'Money' set a Guinness World Record as the first song by a K-pop solo artist to reach a billion streams on Spotify. —Catherine Wang Lucy Liu Over the past decade, former banker Lucy Liu and her cofounders have transformed Australian cross-border payments platform Airwallex into a global fintech player with over $600 million in sales and $130 billion in annualized processing volume. After establishing its presence in the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific, the Singapore-headquartered company recently entered Latin America's two largest economies, securing a license to operate in Brazil and finalizing its purchase of Mexican payments-service provider MexPago. An extended series E round in 2022, which brought its funding total to over $900 million, valued Airwallex at $5.6 billion. The company says its next goal is getting IPO-ready by 2026. —C. W. Harshil Mathur A decade ago, Razorpay cofounder and CEO Harshil Mathur found a niche in India's online payments market aimed at startups. Today the Bangalore-based company, which Mathur runs with cofounder and managing director Shashank Kumar, operates one of India's largest payment gateways by revenue and transaction volume and counts 86 of the country's top 100 unicorns by valuation (or could say 86 of the country's 100 most valuable unicorns) among its customers. Sales in the year ended March 2024 climbed nearly 10% to 25 billion rupees ($300 million) as total payment volume hit 15 billion rupees, up from 12.6 billion rupees a year earlier. The pair are pressing ahead with a massive scale-up, both at home and across Southeast Asia. —Anuradha Raghunathan (Click here for the full story) Ryo Ogawa Timee made headlines last July when the on-demand job platform, cofounded by Ryo Ogawa, listed in Japan at a market valuation of ¥140 billion ($972 million), making it one of the country's largest public offerings in recent years. With Japanese companies increasingly looking for help securing staff in a tight labor market, the company's net profit jumped 55% to ¥2.8 billion on a nearly 67% increase in revenue to ¥27 billion in its latest financial year ended in October. Ogawa and his former business partner, Yoshiki Fuke, who's since left the company, launched Timee (then called Taimee) in 2017 to match gig workers with restaurants and stores. It now has almost 11 million part-timers and more than 340,000 businesses registered on its app, which also caters to the logistics, elderly care and hospitality sectors, among others. Workers use the platform for free, while businesses pay the freelancer's wages through Timee, plus a 30% commission on every paycheck and a ¥200 transaction fee. Ogawa's 25% stake is now worth $280 million. —James Simms Melanie Perkins In Canva's early days, Melanie Perkins learned to kitesurf to be able to hang with a group of venture capitalists in Hawaii. She's since raised close to $600 million from investors and built a global design software giant with more than $3 billion in annualized sales and over 230 million monthly active users. After a secondary share sale in October, the Sydney-headquartered company was valued at $32 billion, down 20% from its peak valuation of $40 billion achieved in 2021. Perkins and her husband Cliff Obrecht, Canva's chief operating officer, share a fortune of $11.5 billion. Its first AI graphic design tools, capable of generating text and images, created an industry buzz when released in 2023; the company's most recent software launch includes Canva Sheets, which can turn data into interactive graphics with a click. —C. W. James Prananto James Prananto is giving Kopi Kenangan, the Jakarta-based coffee chain he cofounded in 2017, a jolt. By year-end he plans to open ten stores in India and eight in Australia to expand its footprint in the region, following moves into the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore since 2022. The goal, he says, is to triple the total number of outlets to 3,000 by 2028 from 1,000 today. Kopi Kenangan, known for its affordable coffee and local Indonesian flavors, such as its signature palm-sugar latte, became a unicorn in 2021 after a series C funding round that valued the company at more than $1 billion. It's also ventured into food, such as its Cerita Roti baked goods and Chigo fried chicken. —Ardian Wibisono Check out our full Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2025 list here.
Entrepreneur
13-05-2025
- Business
- Entrepreneur
Billdesk's M N Srinivasu Elected IAMAI Chairman for 2025–2027
Joining him on the executive council are Harshil Mathur, CEO and Co-founder of Razorpay, as Vice Chairman, and Sameer Nigam, Founder and CEO of PhonePe, as Treasurer. You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media. The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) has announced the results of its biennial governing council elections. M N Srinivasu, Co-founder of Billdesk, has been elected the new Chairman, taking over from Harsh Jain, Co-founder and CEO of Dream Sports. Joining him on the executive council are Harshil Mathur, CEO and Co-founder of Razorpay, as Vice Chairman, and Sameer Nigam, Founder and CEO of PhonePe, as Treasurer. They succeed Rajesh Magow, Co-founder and Group CEO of MakeMyTrip, and Satyan Gajwani, Vice Chairman of Times Internet, respectively. The new executive leadership—Srinivasu, Mathur, and Nigam—will serve alongside IAMAI President Dr Subho Ray, who continues as the ex officio member. Together, they will lead the Association's 24-member governing council for the 2025–2027 term. The official handover will take place at IAMAI's upcoming annual general meeting. IAMAI, a not-for-profit industry body with over 600 members including major Indian and global digital firms, has played a key role in advancing India's digital ecosystem. It promotes fair competition, progressive regulation, startup growth, consumer safety, and digital trust. With its new leadership, the Association aims to further strengthen its efforts in policy advocacy, research, and industry collaboration to support India's evolving digital economy.
