Razorpay has raised $375 million from a group of investors in one of its largest fundraises to date, increasing its valuation to $7.5 billion, a more than twofold increase from the previous $3 billion valuations.
According to an official statement, this Series F round represents one of the year's fastest increases in valuation for an Indian unicorn.
In October 2020, Razorpay was valued at $1 billion, and in April 2021, it was valued at $3 billion. The Series-F round brings the fintech behemoth's total investment to $740 million since its inception in 2014.
The Series-F fundraise was co-led by Lone Pine Capital, Alkeon Capital, and TCV, and included existing investors such as Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital India, GIC, and Y Combinator.
These funds will be used to build a full-stack financial solutions company that will meet all of a company's payment and banking needs on a single platform. The funds will be used to expand its Business Banking Suite, RazorpayX, and offer new banking solutions in 2022, allowing businesses to focus less on compliance and operations and more on growth. In addition, the financial solutions firm intends to invest in new acquisitions in 2022 and expand its global presence, beginning with Southeast Asian countries. The fintech unicorn intends to hire over 600 people to fuel its expansion plans in India and elsewhere.
The payments company recently announced new initiatives for India's 63 million medium, small, and micro enterprises to help theircustomers checkout faster with fewer clicks, as well as a platform for efficient tax
payments and plans to invest in and support startups.
"We're living in an exciting time of change." We've come a long way in seven years, and evenmore so since 2020, and I'm grateful to the company for getting us this far. We've been humbled and excited to have had the opportunity and trust of 8Mn partner businesses throughout this journey. And now, we believe we will radically change how payments and banking are done in nearly every sector of India," said Harshil Mathur, Razorpay's CEO and Co-Founder.
"While these newly infused funds will be used in a variety of ways, the most important will be to invest in the development of intelligent technologies that will make the lives of small businesses easier by providing them with a fundamentally different experience and reducing complexity." We want them to spend less time managing compliance and operations and more time developing new products, building on new ideas, and thinking on a larger scale. It's encouraging to know that our global investors continue to believe in this mission. This investment will help us take financial services to the next level, serve underserved businesses, and continue to build Digital India's central nervous system," he added.
The Bengaluru-based company claims to be assisting over 25,000 Indian businesses with money management. In addition to product expansion, RazorpayX is considering global expansion. Southeast Asian (SEA) countries face similar payment challenges to India, and Razorpay will look to leverage its leadership in developing intelligent payment products and learnings to ripe markets like SEA countries.
"Over the last seven years, we've worked tirelessly to make Razorpay a people-first technology and product company." If the Razorpay team has committed to doing one thing since 2014, it is to never stop reinventing itself. We want to create new products and experiences that will impact millions of businesses and consumers. Over the years, we've received a lot of positive feedback from our partners, which has reassured us that we're on the right track. With the funds raised, we intend to continue providing a payment and banking experience that businesses will benefit from and worry less about," Razorpay's CTO and Co-Founder, Shashank Kumar, stated
"The rapid growth of Razorpay demonstrates the country's massive fintech adoption." "We at Razorpay are all set to make a bigger dent in the fintech universe, and we will be able to build an A-class financial service infrastructure for India's businesses with the help of new acquisitions and partnerships," Kumar said.
Razorpay powers payments for 34 of the 42 companies that were named unicorns in 2021 alone. As of early December 2021, Razorpay had a TPV (total payment volume) of $60 billion. The company intends to achieve a TPV of $90 billion by the end of 2022. For the second year in a row, the company grew by more than 300 percent year on year.