Razorpay — What I Think
Razorpay understood that in India the consumer-payments war was a bloodbath nobody could win, so they went where the money actually was. The developer.
Everyone in Indian fintech circa 2014 was chasing the user, the wallet, the QR, the cashback. Razorpay looked at the same market and saw that the user was already covered, and the real pain was on the other side of the transaction. A founder trying to accept a payment in India faced a nightmare. Legacy bank gateways, weeks of integration, terrible docs, failures nobody could debug. Razorpay’s insight was Stripe’s insight applied to a far messier market: make accepting money a clean API call, and the developers who integrate you become your distribution. Seven lines of code instead of a six-week bank integration. That’s not a payments company. That’s a developer-experience company that happens to move money.
I respect this more than almost anything in Indian fintech, because it’s the bet I’d make. B2B infrastructure is unglamorous and durable. You’re not fighting for fickle consumer attention with cashback you can’t afford. You’re embedded in someone’s checkout, their payroll, their books, and switching you out means re-architecting their stack. The moat is integration depth, not float. And it compounds. Once you’re the payment layer, you can climb into neobanking for businesses, lending, payroll, the whole financial OS of a company. Own the developer, slowly own the business.
What they got right: in a market where the regulator deliberately commoditizes consumer payments, the margin migrates to the businesses who need plumbing they can’t build themselves. India was about to mint millions of small online merchants, D2C brands, SaaS startups, all of whom needed to accept money and none of whom wanted to talk to a bank. Razorpay built the abstraction layer over India’s chaotic banking backend so its customers never had to. That abstraction is the product.
Where the risk lives: India’s payment infrastructure keeps getting better and more public, and a fat chunk of what a gateway abstracts away could get standardized into the rails themselves. When the underlying plumbing improves, the middleman has to keep climbing or get squeezed. The good news is they saw that early and started becoming a business banking platform, not just a gateway. Move up before the floor rises to meet you.
Favorite & worst CEO
- On its leadership: Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, co-founders. I connect with this pair more than almost any in the Indian list, because they made the contrarian engineer’s bet, ignore the loud consumer war, solve the unsexy developer pain, let integration depth be the moat. Building Stripe-for-a-harder-market took real product taste and the patience to win B2B, which has no cashback fireworks, just compounding lock-in. The open question for their vision is the same one all infrastructure faces: as India’s public rails get richer, can they keep climbing into the full financial OS for businesses faster than the floor rises. Strong founding instinct, and the next chapter is about altitude.
Part of “What I Think About the Top 50 Fintech Companies of All Time.” I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.