SBI: Shashank Kumar’s company, Razorpay, was listed as one of India’s most valuable unlisted companies in the recent Hurun report. It ranked fifth with a value of Rs 61,700 crore. Shashank Kumar and his friend Harshil Mathur, who both studied at IIT Roorkee, founded Razorpay.
Shashank Kumar, who was the company’s CTO and creator of the product, is now the Managing Director (MD), while Harshil Mathur is the CEO. Shashank Kumar was born in Patna and had a well-paying job at Microsoft in the US, earning a lot of money in dollars and driving a fancy Ford Mustang car. However, his passion for starting his own business led him to take a big risk.
Shashank Kumar’s father worked for the State Bank of India, and his mother was a homemaker. He completed his schooling at St. Xavier’s High School in Patna, Bihar, and then attended the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee, where he studied computer science. After graduating, he got a job at Microsoft through campus placement in the US. However, he left the job in less than two years to create India’s first payment gateway for small businesses and startups.
Razorpay
Razorpay is an India-based, fintech company that provides payment gateway services to vendors, merchants and ecommerce platforms. It is an online system that is designed to handle end-to-end payments that can also be integrated with different websites and apps. The company was founded by IIT Roorkee alumni Shashank Kumar and Harshil Mathur in 2014. It is headquartered in Bangalore, India.
In 2014, Shashank Kumar and Harshil Mathur met in IIT Roorkee when the duo decided to work on a crowdfunding platform. However, they realized that online payment was a problem for SMBs and SMEs, especially the ecommerce companies. Therefore, they formed Razorpay to solve this problem. The idea of Razorpay was to bring a payment gateway for startups who can easily integrate this system on their websites.