Razorpay, a Bengaluru-based comprehensive banking and payments platform, announced that it is extending Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) worth Rs 1 lakh to all its existing customers. employees.
The move marks RazorPay’s 10th anniversary and highlights its employee-focused philosophy, which has played a key role in the company’s success and rapid growth since its inception in 2014.
At present, it has over 3,000 employees, which translates into a total ESOP value of over Rs 30 crore.
A decade of growth and innovation
Founded by Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar in 2014, Razorpay started with the aim of simplifying online payments for businesses.
Over the past decade, the fintech giant has grown exponentially, serving more than 300 million end-consumers and processing an annualized total payments volume (TPV) of $180 billion. It has also secured over $800 million in funding across multiple rounds, reaching a valuation of around $7.5 billion.
“In 2014, when we launched Razorpay, we didn’t think of it as a startup: it was a huge customer problem that we wanted to solve,” Mathur said.
“That’s been the common denominator so far. I believe our customer-centric vision is what transformed us from a simple idea of making payments seamless to a platform that is making the dreams of millions of businesses across India come true today.
Employee-centered philosophy
Razorpay’s move to extend ESOPs worth Rs 1 lakh to each current employee is unusual in the Indian startup ecosystem, where ESOPs are often reserved for senior team members or certain high-performing employees . According to the company, many of its employees will receive ESOPs for the first time.
“While we are proud and humbled by how far we have come, this 10-year milestone is only the beginning of a much larger journey that lies ahead,” Mathur said.
“The ESOP initiative is our way of ensuring that every teammate shares in the success as we continue to innovate, simplify the movement of money and create even more value for businesses in India and beyond.
Over the years, Razorpay has launched several ESOP buyback programs. In 2018, 140 employees were able to liquidate their vested shares and in 2022, a $75 million buyout benefited 650 current and former employees.
Looking back on the last 10 years, Shashank Kumar, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Razorpay, said: “It has been an incredible and humbling decade of innovation, growth and transformation for us, and I would congratulate our team for having instilled the right mindset from the start. Early on, Harshil and I were shaped by our middle-class upbringing, where we learned to prioritize the right things rather than taking shortcuts. »
“Razorpay was never about winning in the short term but about building something meaningful in the long term. This reinforced a simple principle: do what adds value to our customers and avoid distractions like chasing trends or short-term optimizations for value. This mindset has become the foundation of our culture – and it is this culture of long-term thinking and value creation that drives us to recognize and reward value. hard work of our team through initiatives such that granting ESOP to all employees The next chapter promises even more, and I look forward to building it with our razors.
Future projects
Razorpay has launched several new initiatives in recent months, including the Razorpay Venture Investment program, which aims to support and empower the next generation of B2B innovators.
The company reported a 24% year-on-year revenue increase for its payment gateway business in FY2024, reaching Rs 2,068 crore. Profit after tax also increased fivefold during the same period, highlighting Razorpay’s strong financial performance.