The archive · Money & Fintech · Strategic decision · 2012–2025
Juspay's payments-orchestration bet: built BHIM, hit ~$1B as gateways cut ties
Juspay bet one SDK could route payments across India's gateways and UPI; it built BHIM, hit ~$1B in 2025, then gateways cut ties.
Juspay
What the business is
Juspay sells payment-orchestration software that lets a merchant connect once and route transactions across many Indian payment gateways and UPI apps; it also built NPCI's BHIM app.
Starting capital：$60M Series C in 2021 led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2; more than $237M raised in total by January 2025.
How it started
Vimal Kumar and Sheetal Lalwani founded Juspay in Bengaluru in 2012. The founding bet was that India's fragmented payments landscape — dozens of gateways, wallets and UPI — would make a neutral orchestration layer more valuable than any single gateway, and that solving one painful step of checkout would get the biggest apps as first customers.
What happened
The strategy compounded: NPCI approached Juspay to develop BHIM, its UPI app, and Juspay's OTP-read software became standard in mobile checkout. In 2021 SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a $60M Series C; FY24 operating revenue grew 49.6% to ₹319.32 Cr while losses were cut roughly 10%. In February 2024 the RBI authorized Juspay as a payment aggregator, and it launched HyperPG — putting it in direct competition with the gateways it routed traffic to. Between late 2024 and April 2025, PhonePe, Razorpay, Cashfree and Paytm reportedly cut integrations with Juspay, citing concerns about the transparency of its routing engine.
How it ended up
In January 2025 Moneycontrol reported a $150M round led by Kedaara Capital, WestBridge and SoftBank at about $1B — India's first unicorn of the year. By April 2025 Inc42 reported a $60M Series D led by Kedaara with SoftBank and Accel, with the company pushing into AI and global expansion while the gateways kept their distance.
Background
Juspay, founded in Bengaluru in 2012 by Vimal Kumar and Sheetal Lalwani, bet that India's fragmented payments market would make a neutral orchestration layer worth more than any single gateway. Its software lets a merchant integrate once and then route transactions across dozens of payment gateways and UPI apps, starting with the most painful part of checkout: OTP auto-read and payment-page optimization.
The bet compounded. NPCI approached Juspay to build BHIM, its UPI app, and Juspay's checkout tooling spread across India's largest e-commerce apps. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a $60M Series C in 2021; FY24 operating revenue rose 49.6% to ₹319.32 Cr with losses cut about 10%. In February 2024 the RBI authorized Juspay as a payment aggregator, and it launched its own gateway product, HyperPG.
That licence changed its position. PhonePe, Razorpay, Cashfree and then Paytm reportedly cut integrations with Juspay from late 2024 into April 2025, saying the routing engine that had made it indispensable was no longer transparent. Even so, in January 2025 Moneycontrol reported Juspay raising $150M at about $1B — India's first unicorn of 2025 — and by April Inc42 confirmed a $60M Series D led by Kedaara Capital with SoftBank and Accel. Juspay is still scaling, but its neutrality, the asset the whole business was built on, is gone.
What has to be true
- Orchestration created lock-in through integration pain: merchants who route through Juspay cannot easily rebuild the connections themselves.
- Building BHIM for NPCI gave Juspay credibility and a seat inside the UPI ecosystem that no gateway had.
- The RBI aggregator licence was a strategic escalation — it made Juspay a direct rival to the gateways it depended on for traffic.
- Gateway exits showed the core risk: a layer that is only trusted while it has nothing to gain from the traffic it sees.
- Revenue growth and loss reduction kept investors willing to mark Juspay up to about $1B even as its customer base churned.
What can be applied
The neutral intermediary everyone depends on becomes a competitor the day it moves into its customers' business — if your product is trust, product-market fit can destroy you.
Aftermath
As of April 2025 Juspay was still private and scaling: it reported FY24 revenue of ₹319.32 Cr, trimmed its net loss to ₹97.54 Cr, and was using its Series D to push AI features and expand beyond India. The reported $150M round at about $1B had not been formally confirmed; Inc42's April story described a closed $60M Series D led by Kedaara Capital. Meanwhile the payment gateways it once orchestrated — PhonePe, Razorpay, Cashfree, Paytm — had stopped integrating with it, making its open-source, AI-driven expansion a test of whether it can grow without the neutrality that built it.
Sources
- Juspay set to become first unicorn of 2025 with $150 million round
- Juspay Secures $60 Mn To Boost Payments Infra With AI
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