"A payment gateway that takes three weeks to integrate isn't infrastructure. It's a project."

Before Titan

The company started with a problem they hit while building something else.

Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar met at IIT Roorkee. Harshil went to Schlumberger as a field engineer, Shashank to Microsoft. In their spare time they were building a crowdfunding site, and to make it work they needed to accept money online. That turned out to be the hard part. The payment gateways available to a small Indian developer in 2014 were slow, badly documented and painful to integrate. If two engineers couldn't get it working, a shopkeeper would have no chance.

They quit and moved to Jaipur, where Harshil had grown up and where the rent was low enough to buy them time.The hard part

To process payments in India you need a bank to sponsor you. In 2014, no bank wanted to sponsor two twenty-three-year-olds.

Harshil has described walking into the HDFC branch near his house and asking how to start a payment gateway, and being asked in return whether what he wanted was a payment gateway. Shashank found branch managers in Patna who had not heard of the product. They went from bank to bank for months, graduating from t-shirts to shirts to suits along the way. By their own count they approached around a hundred. All of them said no.

When one finally agreed, it came with a security deposit of ₹25 lakh, which the company did not have and raised from family.

The rejections were not only from banks. They applied to Y Combinator and were turned down. They worked out what needed fixing, applied again, and got in, launching at the Demo Day in March 2015.

After that, the banks started calling back. Nothing about the product had changed.

The bet

We invested at seed, in 2015, alongside Y Combinator and a group of other early backers.

Payments did not look like a venture category then. It looked like a commodity business already occupied by banks and large incumbents, competing on rates, where a new entrant would have to win the biggest merchants to matter at all.

Razorpay was doing close to the opposite. It was building for small merchants, startups and individual developers — the customers nobody was courting — on the view that if the product was good enough for an engineer to integrate in an afternoon, the companies those engineers worked at would grow into it. A number of the startups that signed up in those early years are now among the largest consumer businesses in the country.

What we could see was two founders who had been their own first customer, and who had spent a year being told no by an entire industry without changing their minds about the problem.

What it became

Razorpay now processes around $180 billion in payments a year for more than ten million businesses, a meaningful share of everything bought online in India.

Revenue reached ₹3,783 crore in FY25, up 65 per cent on the year before, and the core payments business turned EBITDA positive in the same year. The company has extended well past the original gateway — business banking and payroll through RazorpayX, working capital through Razorpay Capital, offline payments, and cross-border acceptance under a dedicated RBI licence. Each of those was built for merchants it already had.

The point is still 2014: two engineers in Jaipur who couldn't find a payment gateway they were willing to use, and a hundred banks that told them not to bother.

In their words

If you're building something before the numbers exist to prove it works, write to us at startups@titancapital.vc.