Our partnership with Vijay Shekhar Sharma began in March 2007. India was beginning to fall in love with mobile phones back then as call rates had dropped to under INR 1 / minute. The company was called One97 Communications and aimed to become a dominant player in the Indian telecom market by partnering with content creators for mobile VAS (value-added services) and owning the ability to deliver it.

who pitched to us back then, Vijay did not have an IIT degree or multiple years of corporate experience under his belt. However, his raw energy levels and passion for the business made him stand out and we couldn't resist investing. Vijay was extremely ambitious and obsessed about owning the distribution of content to telecom subscribers. He had also been through tough times in the past and demonstrated great resilience. Both of these ingredients were extremely critical in our view for building a long-lasting institution in a tough market like India.

The company had more capital in the bank than they had raised and was quite comfortably placed. However, Vijay still felt a gap in his personal ambition and wanted to create a B2C platform that could have an order of magnitude higher impact and scale as compared to the B2B2C / B2B approach that One97 had historically taken. B2C products of that scale had thus far been created only by international companies and Vijay wanted to prove that Indian companies had the capability to create similar products that could be used by hundreds of millions of Indian citizens every day.

Vijay realized that as mobile internet and smartphones find adoption in India, telecom operators will start losing their grip on the customer and the fundamental technology stack would go through a change. He then started exploring all possible opportunities ranging from creating Android devices to building an app store to creating an advertising ecosystem. The eureka moment came on a trip to the US when Vijay made his first purchase on the iOS App store and realized that if smartphones were to be successful in India, it would be contingent on the success of apps, which would again be contingent on a payment system for apps. He then started researching the current payment stacks for debit cards, credit cards, and net banking in India and realized that most of them were clunky and not best suited for the smartphone era.

When Vijay pitched this idea to the board for the first time, he encountered quite a lot of skepticism. The questions posed ranged from why would India suddenly start adopting online payments and move away from cash, to why is this the right time to build the business because the cheapest smartphone is still sold for $400-500 which is too expensive for India, to even if this vision was true, why would the current team that has historically focussed on B2B technology be best placed to build a consumer tech business which requires large investments in marketing and brand building. The board meeting ended with no confirmation of Vijay's plans but he continued to believe that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, so much so, that he was even willing to put his equity on the line to do this.

has been their relentless focus on understanding the Indian consumer’s tastes and preferences and doing whatever it takes to give them the best possible user experience. Even before the roll-out of Paytm, the company built out 24X7 customer care to address the worries of customers and to help build trust that enables them to put their money in the hands of the unknown.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder & CEO, Paytm

also came through an observation made by the customer support team. Back in the days, when consumers were using Paytm to recharge their phones etc., whenever payments failed, it would take 4-5 days for the money to get refunded back to them. In this period, the customer would get extremely worried because they thought they had lost their money and sent multiple messages expressing their dissatisfaction to customer care. One of the team members then suggested that to gain customer confidence, Paytm should show this balance on the app to the customer even if the company hadn’t received the money back yet. This ended up becoming version 1 of the Paytm Wallet. A few months later, Paytm hired a product manager who introduced the idea of opening up the wallet to other merchants. One of the early adopters of this product was Uber India and from there on there has been no looking back. From that point Paytm has always thought of itself as an ecosystem business.

with Payment Gateway as its first product.

to enable cashless payments across offline shops

with movie ticketing as the first product.

by investing $300M in Paytm

which now offers a rich portfolio of games and entertainment content including casual games, contests, and sports games.

with a vision to offer bite-sized products at competitive prices to merchants and customers within the ecosystem

This is still just the beginning

Over the last decade, Paytm has also empowered millions of merchants with technology to help them run and grow their business efficiently.