Blog

Mention super-apps and people mostly think of consumer tech companies developing ‘sticky’ platforms with various products and services to increase customer lifetime value or CLV. It is the holy grail of every B2C company. But of late, a B2B fintech company has quietly adopted the same strategy to accelerate growth. The results are already showing for Bengaluru-headquartered Razorpay. After operating for six years and a half and raising $206.6 Mn, the company joined the coveted unicorn club in 2020.

Set up in 2014 by Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, Razorpay had a clear vision of the future as the digital era was maturing fast and businesses were ready to embrace the new approach. But the pain point could not be ignored as new-age merchants, especially small businesses, required payment integration across apps and websites not only for seamless operations but also because they wanted to grow across boundaries. Moreover, those were the pre-demonetisation years when most people were not familiar with digital wallets, and the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) did not exist. A homogeneous payments processing experience was the need of the hour and Razorpay lived up to that.

In the past couple of years, the payments enabler consistently grew its transaction volume by more than 500% year on year to become one of the largest players in this space. But the founders are not content. Using its user base as a funnel, the fintech firm is rapidly expanding into neobanking services such as small-ticket loans, automated salary payments and B2B payments for merchants, in a bid to become an end-to-end solutions provider for online businesses.

However, its core competencies lie in payments solutions and related product innovations. That is why investors bet on its growth story. Online payments processing accounts for 80% of its revenue as the company currently serves 5 Mn businesses, up from 1 Mn a year ago, and has the likes of Airtel, BookMyShow, Facebook India and Sony as its customers.