The archive · Money & Fintech · Strategic decision · 2014–2025
Razorpay's full-stack fintech bet: FY25 revenue up 65%, agentic payments, India IPO next
Razorpay bet merchants wanted more than a payment gateway; FY25 revenue rose 65% to ₹3,783 Cr and it built India's first AI chatbot payment layer.
Razorpay
What the business is
Razorpay is a Bengaluru fintech that started as an online payment gateway and now sells payment processing, point-of-sale, business banking (RazorpayX), lending, cross-border and AI-agent payment infrastructure to Indian businesses.
How it started
Founded in 2014 by Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, Razorpay began as an online payment gateway for Indian businesses. The founding bet was that Indian startups and SMEs would trust a developer-friendly payments API over slow bank integrations; the company later expanded into a full-stack financial services platform.
What happened
In FY25 Razorpay's consolidated revenue rose 65% to ₹3,783 Cr from ₹2,296 Cr, driven by gateway, POS, loyalty, RazorpayX and international operations; gross profit grew 41% to ₹1,277 Cr and core online payments became EBITDA-profitable, though the group reported a ₹1,209 Cr net loss after ESOP expenses, restructuring and redomiciling taxes. In May 2025 it completed a reverse flip, merging its US parent into Razorpay Software India ahead of an India listing planned for FY27. In October 2025, NPCI, OpenAI and Razorpay launched a nationwide pilot letting consumers pay inside ChatGPT via UPI Reserve Pay and UPI Circle, with Razorpay as the merchant integration layer and BigBasket and Vi as launch partners.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
Razorpay was founded in 2014 by Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar as an online payment gateway for Indian businesses. The bet was that merchants wanted a developer-friendly payments stack they could trust, and that the relationship would deepen into full-stack financial services — payments, business banking, lending and cross-border — rather than stay a thin processing fee.
The strategy showed in the FY25 numbers: consolidated revenue rose 65% to ₹3,783 Cr with gross profit up 41% to ₹1,277 Cr, and the core online payments business turned EBITDA-profitable. The group still reported a ₹1,209 Cr net loss, which Razorpay attributed to ESOP expenses, restructuring and taxes from redomiciling its parent from the US into India in May 2025 — a move designed to clear the path for an Indian listing in FY27.
In October 2025 Razorpay became the merchant integration layer for India's first AI-chatbot payments pilot, built with NPCI and OpenAI: consumers can shop and pay inside ChatGPT using UPI Reserve Pay and UPI Circle, with BigBasket and Vi as launch merchants and Gemini/Claude integrations in progress. CEO Harshil Mathur called agentic payments 'a technological shift, like the way UPI was' and said profitability in 2026 would align with the filing and listing timeline.
What has to be true
- Expanding from gateway to RazorpayX, POS, lending and cross-border let Razorpay capture more of each merchant's money movement, not just the swipe fee.
- 65% revenue growth in FY25 while core payments turned EBITDA-profitable showed the stack strategy working in the same year.
- Redomiciling to India in May 2025 removed a structural blocker to listing on Indian exchanges.
- Being picked by NPCI and OpenAI as the merchant layer for agentic payments put Razorpay at the front of a new payment rail before it commoditized.
What can be applied
The way out of a commoditized gateway market is owning the money movement around the transaction — business banking, lending, new payment rails — so value compounds instead of shrinking to fees.
Aftermath
As of October 2025, Razorpay's online payments business was EBITDA-profitable and generating cash, newer businesses (RazorpayX, POS, cross-border) were scaling, and the company was on track to file and list in FY27 once fully profitable; media reported plans to enter three to four more Southeast Asian markets after Singapore and Malaysia, and Razorpay was rolling out biometric card authentication and agentic payment products.
Sources
- Razorpay FY25: Revenue Jumps 65%, IPO on the Horizon
- India pilots AI chatbot-led e-commerce with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude in the mix
- AI payments could become the new UPI in five years: Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur
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