On The Edge

Razorpay co-founder and CEO Harshil Mathur talks about the company’s 10-year journey, the upcoming IPO and buying his first suit at the advice of Sam Altman

- Shrabonti Bagchi and Priyamvada C

So when we realised it has been 10 years, it came as a bit of a surprise, 'Hey, has it really been that long?" says Harshil Mathur, CEO and co-founder at Razorpay, widely considered India's top online payment gateway, a digital service that lets businesses accept and process payments online, acting as a secure link between the buyer and the seller's banks.

Founded in 2014, Razorpay is so widely used and so intricately involved in India's e-commerce and payment ecosystem that you might be mistaken for believing it has always existed, but it's journey started only a decade ago.

For Mathur, 33, looking back at this journey is a bit like watching a time-lapse video-everything moving at a crazy speed, the shifting so subtle that you don't notice when everything is different. It is reflected in the way he talks-at a rapid clip, his words tripping over each other. It made transcribing this interview hard, but listening to it, you get the sense of a fiercely motivated team that refuses to slow down-even when Indian banks and regulators force them to, as has happened a few times with Razorpay.

When we meet in early January, it's just over a year since the embargo on onboarding new merchants imposed on the company by RBI in December 2022 (linked to licensing issues in a fast-changing financial environment where products often precede laws) was lifted. In the calendar year following that, the company grew at an unprecedented pace, says Mathur. "Typically, we onboard 100,000200,000 merchants in a year. Once the moratorium was lifted, within a period of two months, we onboarded 150,000 merchants because almost 80% of the businesses that had signed up before it was imposed came back and started using Razorpay again," says Mathur.