India’s FinTech giant Razorpay raises US$375 million, valuation soars to US$7.5 billion

Razorpay, an India-based payment gateway provider has raised US$375 million in Series F round led by Lone Pine Capital, Alkeon Capital, and TCV. The funding round was also joined by existing investors Sequoia Capita India, Tiger Global, Y Combinator, and GIC.

The new funding round takes Razorpay’s valuation at US$7.5 billion, more than double in April 2021 when it had raised US$160 million.

With this fresh infusion of funds, the FinTech unicorn plans to strengthen India’s financial infrastructure for small businesses. The funds will also be deployed to further scale its neo-banking platform, RazorpayX.

The Bengaluru-based startup may also be looking at new acquisitions in the B2B segment as well as expansion in South East Asian countries.

The startup has made three acquisitions to date including Opfin and Thirdwatch.

Harshil Mathur, CEO and Co-founder of Razorpay said, “As we look towards our future and the opportunity Fintech in India holds, we realize that we have only scratched the surface, there is so much more to do and a long way to go towards helping our country and its businesses be economically more inclusive.

He added, “As we continue to build for the underserved part of the market and as we bring more and more innovations into the payments and banking space for Indian businesses, we believe that we can rapidly accelerate this digitisation.”

Diving Deeper

Razorpay is one of those firms that has benefitted from the pandemic-induced spurt in digital payments as a large number of merchants clocked rapid growth since the coronavirus outbreak in the country.

“We have become the de-facto choice for business (payments solutions). We went from five million to eight million merchants as many internet businesses are scaling very fast and they are getting funded to grow further,” Mathur said. He added, “Neobanking banking is really scaling for us and all our offerings are now starting to come together (at a scale). We now have 25,000 users who use our banking suite service. This is a new industry we have created working with internet-first brands, early-stage startups.”

Razorpay that presently claims to power payments for more than 8 million businesses including Ola, Facebook, Zomato, CRED, Swiggy; now aims to reach 10 million businesses by 2022. It competes with Paytm, PayU, CCAvenue, Cashfree in the payment gateway business whereas in the netbanking space Open is its direct competition.

According to the company, it has clocked more than 300 percent year-on-year growth  and claims US$60 million total payment value (TPV) as of early December 2021 and targets a US$90 million TPV by the end of the year.