Stripe was built for the US. We built Razorpay for India. Same developer-first philosophy, completely different infrastructure. India has UPI, net banking, wallets, EMI — Stripe couldn't handle that complexity.
We applied to Y Combinator and got rejected. Then we applied again and got in. The product was the same. The traction was different. YC doesn't bet on ideas. They bet on numbers.
Shashank and I were at IIT Roorkee together. Two engineering students who knew nothing about finance. We built a payments company because integrating payments into our college project was so painful that we thought — someone should fix this.
We process payments for 10 million businesses in India. Ten million. From the local chai stall to Airtel to Cred. When 10 million businesses depend on your uptime, you don't sleep well. But you sleep knowing you matter.
We became India's most valuable fintech startup at $7.5 billion. Two guys from Jamshedpur who couldn't get a meeting with a bank five years earlier. India's startup story is being written by people the establishment never saw coming.