Back in December 2014 when we got a call from Paul Buchheit, partner at Y Combinator and creator of GMail, letting us know that we had been accepted for Y Combinator’s W15 batch, we could not really have predicted what all we would achieve in a year and half’s time. Now that we look back at it, it has definitely exceeded what we could have even imagined!
We grew from an initial team of 9, all working remotely during the YC period, to setting up our headquarters in the heart of Indian startup ecosystem, Bangalore. Incidentally, just yesterday our 50th employee joined us!
In between, we also got joined by like minded investors who not only believed in our vision to fix the state of payments in India, but also in our teams capability to execute on this lofty vision. The guidance that Tiger Global, Matrix Partners, Y Combinator and 33 angel investors have provided have also helped us immensely in growing to our current stage, where we have 8000+ merchants accepting payments through Razorpay. And we are just getting started.
Today we are excited to announce that we are working with MasterCard to speed up the adoption of online and mobile payments among small businesses in India. As part of an ongoing effort to improve online transactions, we have integrated the MasterCard Payment Gateway to enable merchants and card issuers to authenticate each other seamlessly prior to the authorization of a transaction.
Since late 2015, we have worked with the MasterCard Start Path program – a global effort to support startups developing the next generation of commerce and fintech technologies – to get support in technology enhancements and tap into the company’s global risk and fraud expertise.
In addition to the Start Path activities, MasterCard has also invested in Razorpay.
With this, we truly believe that a deeper collaboration with MasterCard will help us address the many infrastructural challenges in Indian payments ecosystem. Since day one, we have been an evangelist of technology over manual processes traditionally followed and in Mastercard, we found an investor with similar mindset and a willingness to disrupt.
Slowly but surely, India’s mindset over online payments and fintech is shifting towards API based, interconnected systems and banks are starting to think along these lines. With UPI being one example of initiative being taken by the government itself, the future looks bright. At Razorpay, we would be the first to initiate and adopt such changes. We promise to keep on striving to make payments in India simple, secure and efficient.
Until next time!
Harshil Mathur, Co-founder
