Razorpay signals intent to step up SEA expansion, names COO for India, Malaysia

One Thing Today in Tech

Razorpay, a leading fintech name in India, providing a payments platform and banking-as-a-service software to some 10 million businesses, in the country, yesterday elevated Rahul Kothari to the position of chief operating officer for India and Malaysia.

Kothari was previously chief business officer at the company. He will report to founder and CEO Harshil Mathur, the Bengaluru company said in a press release yesterday.

This appointment sharpens Razorpay’s focus on the Southeast Asia region, where it’s looking to expand. The company also aims to implement a deeper integrated strategy to step up growth by improving customer experience across its different lines of business and products.

In January, I wrote that Razorpay was at an inflexion point. About a month before that Shashank Kumar, the other founder, and Murali Brahmadesam had spoken about sustaining the culture of engineering at the company as it became bigger.

Brahmadesam came in from AWS, earlier last year, and he’d taken on the CTO’s role from Kumar, who was looking to free himself up from day-to-day engineering to focus on products strategy.

The company has about 1,000 engineers among its 3,500 staff, or “Razors” as they’re called internally, including several senior engineering leaders. Kumar had talked about how over the next five years, Razorpay would seek “tremendous scale.”

And imports such as Brahmadesam will be playing a critical role on the engineering front.

Razorpay is stepping up its expansion into a broader financial services platform, from its flagship payments business—it accounts for most of its revenues and is making money on a standalone basis—to facilitating loans, and banking software.

The company is expected to go deeper into the emerging hot area of ‘banking as a service,’ which accounting giant Deloitte defines as provisioning of banking products and services through third-party distributors.

This opens up the possibility that a large number of new niche finance startups can partner large, established banks and financial services companies, and help each other tap a significantly larger market than they could individually. Razorpay could emerge as a facilitator of this growth, and benefit from it.

To throw the story forward, while Razorpay has made a name for itself in India, “We want to see how we can create a global engineering brand while we are working out of Bengaluru and India,” Kumar had told me a year ago.

Organizational changes such Kothari’s appointment are important incremental steps in that direction on the business front. Kothari has a degree in chemical engineering from IIT Kanpur, and an MBA from Indian School of Business.

Over the last 20 years or so, he’s worked in the US, Europe and Australia. Currently based in Pune, he’s into his fifth year with Razorpay. Previously, Kothari played a critical role in making the payments business profitable at PayU, according to Razorpay’s press release.

He's also worked at security software company Symantec, BPO company WNS, and Boston Consulting Group.

Next year, Razorpay will be 10 years old. Technically, it was started in 2013 in Jaipur, but Mathur and Kumar, alumni of IIT Roorkee, moved base to Bengaluru quickly, and the company is widely considered to be founded in 2014. They were one of the first Indian startup founders to be part Y Combinator.

Investors including Lone Pine Capital, Alkeon Capital, TCV, GIC, Tiger Global, Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India), Ribbit Capital, Matrix Partners, and Salesforce Ventures have invested a total of $741.5 million in the company in six rounds of funding.

In December 2021, the company was privately valued at $7.5 billion, making it one of India’s most valued startups. The company reported close to Rs. 1,500 crore in FY22 revenues, a 75 percent growth over the previous fiscal, and it was profitable on a standalone basis, for the flagship payments business.