Online payments startup Razorpay turns profitable as sales rise 10-fold

Jaipur-registered online payment gateway startup Razorpay Software Pvt. Ltd has turned a profit in financial year ending March 2016, filings with the Registrar of Companies (RoC) show.

The company posted a profit after tax of Rs 28.7 lakh for the year, compared with a loss of Rs 4.1 lakh in FY15. Net sales stood at Rs 79 lakh, almost ten times the Rs 8.5 lakh posted in the previous fiscal.

The company, which helps businesses accept online payments via credit/debit card, netbanking and mobile wallets from their end-customers, has over 20,000 merchants, including Papa John's, Knowlarity, Chai Point, Nestaway and Eatfresh, among others. ."

The spokesperson added that these numbers didn't depict the complete picture since the company's "parent entity is in the US, as depicted in the shareholding structure, and consolidated profit or loss is booked there."

In July last year, Razorpay had received an undisclosed investment from American payments and financial services company MasterCard.

So far, it has raised $11.5 million from marquee investors like Tiger Global, Matrix Partners and Y Combinator.

It has 33 angel investors, including Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal (Snapdeal founders), Abhay Singhal, Amit Gupta and Naveen Tewari (InMobi founders), Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon (FreeCharge founders), Punit Soni (former chief product officer at Flipkart), Bill Gajda (SVP, global head of Innovation, Visa), Jeff Huber (SVP, GoogleX), Ram Shriram (board member and an early investor in Google) and Justin Kan (Y Combinator partner and Twitch founder).

Razorpay, the second Indian company to be selected for the Y-Combinator accelerator programme, was founded by IIT-Roorkee alumni Shashank Kumar and Harshil Mathur. Kumar earlier worked with Microsoft while Mathur worked at oilfield services company Schlumberger.

The company, which helps businesses accept online payments via credit/debit card, netbanking and mobile wallets from their end-customers, has over 5,000 merchants, including Papa John's, Knowlarity, Chai Point, Nestaway and Eatfresh, among others.

Razorpay competes with well-funded players such as Citrus, CCAvenue and MobiKwik in India.

On Tuesday, Infibeam Incorporation Ltd entered into a pact to merge CCAvenue with itself in a deal that is expected to value the payment gateway firm at Rs 2,000 crore ($298 million).