Razorpay started because accepting a payment on the Indian internet was still a mess of bank integrations, poor success rates, and paperwork. Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar built a single API so product companies could charge customers and settle to a bank account without rebuilding the stack every time.
Why founders study it
- They sold to other startups first, then grew into enterprises — a classic wedge.
- Compliance (RBI, payment aggregation) was treated as product, not a legal afterthought.
- The company kept expanding around the same job: money in, money out, and the ops in between (Payroll, Rize, POS).
What to steal
If you are building B2B infrastructure in India, pick a painful regulated workflow and make the first integration boringly reliable. Razorpay did not win on a prettier landing page. They won on success rates and a sales motion that understood Indian SMEs.