- Razorpay is a Bengaluru-based fintech company.
- It offers financial services and other services on its platforms.
- The platform saw 10% growth in Tier 3, 4 cities this year.
- Razorpay launches the first app store for the fintech industry.
Financial companies around the world are going digital. Apart from transferring their offline customers to an online service, these fintech companies are vying to acquire a new and younger user base. Companies are always working on finding a more responsible way to connect to these potential customers. Razorpay, the Bengaluru-based Indian fintech unicorn, is also taking a huge step towards innovation. The company plans to launch products like health insurance for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Razorpay recently announced its plans to achieve a goal of $50 billion in Total Payment Volume (TPV). They are planning to achieve this goal by the end of 2021, said a spokesperson at its flagship fintech conference, FTX. It is focusing on innovating B2C financial services and evolving fintech spaces. In October, the fintech company raised $100 million in its funding round, led by Singapore’s GIC and Sequoia India.
Razorpay’s Latest Announcements
The company recently launched its first B2B app store for the fintech industry. The app store aims to empower the developer community to build services beyond fintech. Razorpay allows developers to design flexible solutions to support the five million SMBs on its platform. Apps like WooCommerce, Shopify can help new businesses grow. These businesses can also build online stores and manage accounts with Quickbooks and Zoho Books. Crowdera is another service that can help in raising donations.
Razorpay will also feature vernacular languages like Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, Telugu, and Gujarati. The platform saw a growth of 10% as compared to last year in Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities. Despite the overall slowdown in the economy, COVID-19 accelerated digital adoption for the offline economy. Meanwhile Paytm, its biggest rival has also announced the launch of its mini-app store to counter the monopoly of Google Play Store.
About Razorpay
Razorpay is a platform that enables businesses to accept, process and disburse payments. Its product suite provides access to all payment modes including credit card, debit card, net banking, and UPI. It also supports other popular wallets comprising JioMoney, Mobikwik, Airtel Money, Ola Money, PayZapp, and FreeCharge. The Bengaluru-based company was founded in 2014 by Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar. It successfully raised its Series D funding and is backed by Y Combinator, Sequoia, Ribbit Capital, Tiger LLC, Matrix, and GMO Ventures. Since its inception, it raised $206.5 million and is the fifth Indian fintech firm to achieve ‘unicorn’ status. Paytm, valued at $16 billion, is also in the unicorn club.
The founders realized that it was difficult for Indian startups to accept payments as the existing gateways quite limited back in 2014. In those days, APIs from the banks were not easily available. Thus Razorpay built its platform a ‘product first’ and kept the bank integration in the back. The company began as a team of ten people from the founders’ college circle.
Recently, Razorpay announced that it was partnering with Visa to offer corporate cards to these SMBs. In addition to the new changes, the company is planning to expand its services into South-Asian markets, once the pandemic is contained.
