Razorpay: Building India's Payment Infrastructure from Scratch
How two IIT Roorkee graduates simplified India's chaotic payment ecosystem and built a $7.5 billion company.
The challenge
In 2014, accepting online payments in India required dealing with 50+ banks, each with different APIs and integration requirements. Payment success rates were below 60% — meaning 4 in 10 customers couldn't complete their purchase. The process of getting a payment gateway required weeks of paperwork and was inaccessible to small businesses and startups.
The strategy
Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar's strategy mirrored Stripe's in the USA — make payments trivially easy for developers while handling all banking complexity invisibly. But India had unique challenges: UPI (the government's payment system), multiple wallet providers, EMI options, and extremely price-sensitive merchants who couldn't afford high failure rates.
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Try the full case free →Key lessons (preview)
- Localizing a global product concept (Stripe's approach) for local payment infrastructure creates massive value.
- Payment success rate is a product metric, not just an infrastructure metric — 40% failure is a product failure.
- Intelligent routing across payment providers creates a technical moat that's hard to replicate.