IPO-bound Razorpay turns to AI to help businesses scale faster
IPO-bound digital payments company Razorpay is relying on artificial intelligence (AI) to power its next phase of growth.
The Bengaluru-based fintech startup plans to use intermediary AI in commerce, which allows systems to act autonomously for businesses or customers, to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) process transactions faster and seamlessly.
“We are leaning hard on AI. It is creating the biggest change right now,” said Harshil Mathur, CEO and co-founder of Razorpay. Mint On the sidelines of the fintech firm’s annual FTX summit. “What we are trying to understand is how to bring the power of AI to the small and medium-sized businesses we power in the country.”
Agency commerce is becoming increasingly popular as brands and platforms try to figure out how to make the shopping experience more seamless and intuitive for customers. At the same time, companies like Razorpay are trying to create back-end payment and orchestration systems that these companies will use to strengthen their businesses.
Agency AI systems have become a favorite among investors through 2025 for many reasons. In fact, the promise behind the technology is that businesses can adapt and self-learn to the point where they can employ various intermediaries talking to each other for processes that are largely routine and currently use manual labor.
The agency artificial intelligence package announced for Razorpay on Thursday marks a change for the company. “This is moving us from being just a payment provider for SMEs to becoming their financial operating system,” Mathur said, referring to SMEs.
market opportunity
Razorpay is increasingly focused on making it easier for SMEs to do business and scale faster. Many of these businesses face obstacles such as fraud, failed payments, and difficulty tracking down sellers that can slow their growth.
Razorpay says it wants to solve all these problems by allowing its users to create agents that can solve these problems independently, rather than hiring someone for these tasks. “Businesses don’t want to manage the complexity of working with multiple platforms,” Mathur said. “So this is an opportunity for us because they already do most of their payment systems on our platform.”
According to the Udyam portal operated by the Union ministry of micro, small and medium enterprises, there are currently 79 million registered MSMEs in India. The size of the market makes it an opportunity for Razorpay to disrupt its existing business and add another revenue stream to it.
The fintech believes its AI suite will eventually make up a large part of its business, but Mathur said it’s too early to tell by how much. “Adoption is still adoption. Maybe customers can find their own way to solve problems that don’t need us. We’ll have to see how that actually plays out.”
While the company has launched an AI suite to make the job easier, investments like this tend to be expensive in both technology and monetary terms. However, for now, Razorpay does not charge any fee for the use of the suite. “Once adoption occurs, we will consider a way to charge. There are enough global examples of how you typically charge for agents, where agents are free up to a limit and then you charge for tokens. I will adopt something similar, but it’s too early to tell,” Mathur added.
