Bangalore based fintech startup Razorpay joins the Unicorn club of India, with $100 million in a new financing round. The start-up has shown tremendous growth in recent years and became one of the very few start-ups to join the unicorn club.
This financing round was co-led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and Sequoia India and this fundraising round which was series-D has helped to increase the value of the six-year-old start-up with the collection of more than $1 billion, according to the co-founder and CEO Harshil Mathur.
The start-up is now worth $206.5 million, with the help of some other investors in the round like Tiger Global, Y Combinator, Ribbit Capital, and Matrix Partners as they also participated in the same.
The main function of the company is to accept payment online for their customers like schools, E-commerce, merchants, and other companies and disburse the payment to their employees and others, and do the same in a fast, affordable and secure way for them. In recent years the company has started offering loans for the businesses and has also launched a neo-banking platform through which they issue corporate credit cards among other products.
Razor pay was stared in 2014, by two friends who started their journey when they met each other in at IIT Roorkee. They came to realize that how much small businesses and start-ups struggle when it comes to accepting payment online, also there was very few firm working in this field to help them in the process and they have to produce a lot of paperwork for the same, which was exhausting and time-consuming. So they planned to launch a platform that will help these young start-ups and small enterprises with online transactions.
Initially, a team of 11 people started the journey of Razorpay in a small apartment as the co-founders were visiting several banks to join hands with them. The co-founder recalled as to how they meet with 100 bankers and still the situation was a deadlock for so long, and how difficult it was to explain to the banks and after them to the investors. According to him, the conversation was slow and they were losing hope in the process.
But now the situation has changed for the company, as now they will be called one of the unicorns of India. It is one of the 6 companies, who have joined the unicorn club this year, and has become the largest payment provider for the businesses in the country. The company accepts a wide range of methods for payment such as debit cards, credit cards, mobile wallets, and UPI, which make the work a lot easier for the customers.
The company has some big companies as their clients like Zomato, Oyo, Swiggy, Byju’s, Zilingo, Yatra and Goibibo, and Airtel. The start-up is expecting transactions of $25 billion this year, which will be more than 5 times as of last year for nearly 10 million of its customers.
The co-founder said that this period of pandemic also help in their growth as people adapted to the digital payment system for the transitions. According to him, the company is expecting 35% of start-up revenue from Razorpay capital and Razorpay X by the end of March next year.
The company is expecting to work with 50 million customers by 2025 and may also acquire some of the new firms in the process. While many companies suffered and some have dissolved during the pandemic, companies like Razorpay and Unacademy has achieved the unicorn status in the process.
