Harshil Mathur along with his friend from IIT Roorkee, Sashank Kumar started Razorpay with a very simple idea - improve payment experience for small and medium businesses and startups. In less than six years, the company has joined the likes of Paytm and Zerodha to become the fifth fintech unicorn—startup with over USD 1 bn valuation—in India.
Has the journey been smooth? Of course not, as co-founder and CEO Mathur would say.
So, what made the 20-something duo keep going?
“The problem of a fragmented payments system for small firms and startups was too big to be left unsolved,” recalled Mathur.
It is perhaps the result of their steady focus on solving the consumer problem that within one year of getting first approval from HDFC, the company went live with about 400 enterprise clients, got incubated by Y Combinator, followed by Series A funding of USD 9 mn led by Tiger Global Management.
Success Mantra: To Begin With, Small is Big
In the initial years, chasing transaction volumes, big clients or valuations were not Mathur’s method to scale Razorpay. He focused on a steady but sustainable growth instead.
For one, the company did not waver its attention from the core problem they set out to address—finding right payment solutions for small firms. So much so that when e-commerce behemoth Flipkart showed interest to strike a deal with the company, Razorpay backed out to focus squarely on young startups.
“The challenge for an early stage startup on-boarding a large client is that it ends up building products just for that one client, which is not scalable in the long run,” said Mathur.
The advice to refrain from dealing with a large client right in the beginning came from an investor in the form a hunter’s analogy, he added.
“There are three kinds of clients - rabbit, deer and elephant. Rabbits (small clients) are easy to catch, but you need a lot of them. Catching a deer (mid-size clients) takes effort but they are essential to scale. Elephants, the big guys, from a greedy perspective seem lucrative as you catch one elephant and you're set for a year. But, it's take immense effort and energy to catch one and by the time you do, you might already be done. In the early years when you’re trying to survive, focus on just rabbits and deers. Chasing an elephant will be a recipe for disaster,” he narrated as told by his investor.
Moreover, getting a big client onboard can push the company’s numbers to a different scale and it just can’t afford to come down from there, Mathur adds. To ensure that the graph doesn’t come down, the startup often ends up doing everything that the client asks it to.
“Instead of acquiring new customers and proving your business model, your entire bandwidth would go into serving this one large customer. This is not the right way to build a scalable startup.”
Mathur passes this valuable advice to all young B2B startups.
“The idea is to prove a scalable business model first, and grow from there,” Mathur said. For 2-3 years, the company only targeted small and mid-size startups, innovated new products and built infrastructure big enough to shift focus to large enterprises.
Today, the Bengaluru-headquartered company boasts of a client list that includes the likes of Facebook, Zerodha, Ola, Hotstar, Airtel, BookMyShow, Swiggy and ICICI Prudential, among others.
Innovation Is the Key
Over the years, the company has abided by consistent innovation and restrategising to become one of the largest players in the payments space and the fastest fintech company to become a unicorn.
For instance, in the last one and a half years, the company has built products targeted at companies which do not have a tech team. “We launched EPoS that lets small businesses download a mobile application and make payments online,” Mathur said.
Another major innovation from Razorpay’s book is link-based payments through which a merchant can create a link in real-time, send it to the consumer via SMS and get the payment digitally in place of cash on delivery.
All of these features have been getting good traction and growing organically, Mathur said.
The company claims to have recorded 500 per cent growth in calendar year 2019. Razorpay Software, under which the company’s payments business falls, more than doubled its revenue in FY 2018 at INR 197 crore compared to the year before, as per the company’s filings available on Registrar of Companies website. Further, it reduced its net losses to about INR 3.26 crore in FY18 from over INR 12.70 in FY17.
The payments business is expected to break-even next year, Mathur said.
Covid-19 has further catapulted the company’s growth. “We saw the Covid-19 pandemic as an opportunity as the digital transformation that would have happened over the next 2-3 years was going to happen over the next six months,” Mathur said. “We had a broad arsenal at our disposal that enabled us to make the opportunistic bets.”
Not Just Survived but Thrived During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Despite an initial dip of about 30 per cent in April, Razorpay claims to have clocked an overall 300 per cent growth in the last six months.
That’s spectacular progress for a B2B startup at a time when most businesses reeled under the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ask Mathur and he says the company’s quick re-prioritisation of its sales efforts as per the changed market demand helped it get new customers.
“Our growth depends on the businesses that we serve—if they grow, we grow,” he explained. “So, we shifted focus to industries that involved minimum physical contact and were expected to grow due to the Covid-19 induced lockdown.”
E-commerce, gaming, B2B startups helping businesses digitize and online education were some of the sectors Razorpay narrowed its focus on for customer acquisition. Also, the company sniffed huge business opportunity in small enterprises, such as grocery shops, schools and offline sellers that had never used online payments, wanting to digitize transactions.
“This not only helped us get a large number of subscribers but also grow alongside these sectors after the lockdown restrictions started lifting up,” said Mathur.
Razorpay powers payments for about 5 million businesses, as compared to 1 million last year and processes USD 25 billion in transaction volume, five times compared to last year.
The company also hired about 300 people during the lockdown, when most companies were downsizing to save costs. It plans to hire about 500 more by the end of this financial year.
Beyond Payments: the Way Ahead
Razorpay wants to become a full stack financial company for businesses.
As part of the plan, the company has forayed into lending and neo-banking services with Razorpay Capital and RazorpayX, respectively.
RazorpayX, the neo-banking platform for small and medium businesses (SMEs), has on-boarded about 10,000 businesses since its launch in 2019. The company has collaborated with banks and offers services like debit cards, cheque books, vendor payment services, transaction statements etc, through its app to enrich digital banking experience of its clients.
More importantly, the company provides software solutions on top these services, such as a payroll platform that allows firms to pay employee’s salaries, professional tax etc and vendor management platform to make payments to vendors and pay TDS.
The company is working on adding tax and wealth management features on its neo-banking platform in the coming months.
“The idea is to provide businesses a single platform to manage all their money flows,” Mathur said.
Sandip Ginodia , CEO
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