How a personal problem led to a solution for many

IN 2014, A year after graduating from IIT Roorkee, life for Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar was all about taking the familiar course of working in large global corporations abroad.

- S SHANTHI

IN 2014, A year after graduating from IIT Roorkee, life for Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar was all about taking the familiar course of working in large global corporations abroad. Mathur was working with Schlumberger in West Asia and Kumar got into Microsoft in the US.

The college friends were also using their weekends to build a crowdfunding platform. This passion side project, however, changed their life forever, as they set out resolving what they then perceived to be only a personal problem. The duo had to accept online payments for their work, but the entire process was a tedious exercise. Passionate techies that they were, this was unacceptable. And, they knew that tech could easily solve this.

To understand it further, they connected with Facebook groups of small tech entrepreneurs. "A lot of startups were launching and almost everyone needed payments, but we found out almost everyone struggled with it," Mathur says.

The major issue was getting approvals, as most payment companies focused on large customers like telcos that did huge volumes. Nobody cared about startups or small businesses, which were giving them around 2% revenue. This meant every startup had to fill out many long forms and submit too many documents. It took almost four months for approvals to come in. Additionally, the available technology was sub-par and the payment failure rate was very high.

The duo saw opportunity in this problem faced by many. "Most startups had to opt for cash on delivery because of the delays. This felt very odd to us as the whole point of technology is democratisation. Even a paanwala should be able to accept online payments, we thought," he says.