Razorpay raises $375 million in its largest round till date
Razorpay has raised $375 million in its largest round to date at a valuation of $7.5 billion, its founder Shashank Kumar said in a social media post on Monday.
The funding round was co-led by TCV, Lone Pine Capital LLC and Alkeon Capital Management. Existing investors including Y Combinator, Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital, GIC and Ribbit Capital also participated in the new investment round, Kumar informed.
In an interview with Moneycontrol, Razorpay co-founder and CEO Harshil Mathur said the company would use the funds to scale up its neobanking arm RazorpayX and will also look at acquisitions.
“If there are companies that we can plug into our financial services ecosystem we will look at those. Business-to-business (B2B) SaaS (software as a service) is an area that is interesting because those are the tools that we can plug into our offerings,” said Mathur.
The Bangalore-headquartered fintech startup has more than doubled its valuation from $3 billion in April, relegating Walmart-owned digital payments firm PhonePe to the third spot and trailing Paytm, the largest company in this space that made a disastrous debut on the stock exchanges last month.
According to a news report, Razorpay is also getting itself ready for an initial public offering of shares, but that won’t happen immediately.
“Razorpay is also gearing up to become IPO-ready,” a TechCrunch report quoted Mathur as saying. He, however, made it clear that the startup won’t be exploring the public markets for at least two-and-a-half years.
Razorpay plans to continue to focus on expanding its product offerings and also hire over 600 people to fuel its growth in India and Southeast Asia, the report added.
Founded in 2014 by Kumar and Mathur, both alumni of IIT Roorkee, Razorpay allows businesses to accept, process and disburse payments with its product suite. It gives users access to all payment modes, including credit card, debit card, net-banking, UPI and popular wallets including JioMoney, Mobikwik, Airtel Money, FreeCharge, Ola Money and PayZapp. Kumar said the journey hasn’t been easy, but pledged to persist.
“Being an entrepreneur isn't easy. From payments to credit, payroll to taxation and compliance, etc. there is a lot that a business needs to handle. Every financial process takes the founder away from just focusing on serving their customers and growing their own business. Razorpay's mission is to change this simple fact through technology and make every business a digital business. All this and more wouldn't have been possible without the support and hard work of our incredible team. I cannot thank them enough to be part of our mission every single day. With all that said, we are just getting started and there is a long road ahead. Buckle up and let's get back to work,” he said.