Startup Deep Dive : Juspay — the checkout layer most of India never sees

Most people who use Juspay’s technology every single day have never heard the name. Its code sits quietly behind the checkout button on Amazon, Swiggy, Flipkart and Google Pay, routing roughly 300 million transactions a day as of FY25 — yet the company took 13 years to book its first profit, and in the same year it crossed a $1 billion valuation, four of its biggest customers walked out the door.

Paytm, PhonePe, Razorpay and Cashfree all ended their third-party reliance on Juspay’s routing layer in early 2025, choosing to process payments directly instead. Juspay called it business as usual. The numbers say something more interesting happened: revenue kept climbing, profitability finally arrived, and within twelve months the company raised money twice more, each round pricing it higher than the last. This is the story of how an invisible infrastructure company became one of India’s hardest businesses to dislodge — and why its own success is now its biggest source of friction.

Quick facts

What they do

Juspay builds the software layer that sits between a merchant’s app and the maze of banks, card networks, wallets and UPI apps a payment has to pass through before it counts as “successful”. When someone taps pay on Amazon, Swiggy, Flipkart, Google Pay, Uber or IndiGo, there is a reasonable chance Juspay’s code is deciding which bank or gateway to route that transaction through, retrying it on a different rail if the first one times out, and rendering the actual checkout screen the customer sees. It is not the payment gateway that a small business signs up for directly; it is the orchestration layer that large, high-volume consumer platforms use to make several gateways behave like one reliable system. Juspay’s own account puts this at over 300 million transactions processed daily and an annualised total payment volume crossing $1 trillion, as reported in the company’s FY25 results release. Since 2022 it has also sold a version of that orchestration engine as Hyperswitch, an open-source product aimed at global merchants and banks rather than only Indian ones.

The origin

Vimal Kumar started Juspay in 2012 after watching India’s push into two-factor authentication for card payments create exactly the kind of friction it was meant to prevent. From 2011, every card transaction online required a second verification step — usually a one-time password — on top of entering card details. It made fraud harder, but it also meant a large share of shoppers simply abandoned checkout rather than wait for an SMS that might not arrive in time, an experience The Fintech Times’ account of the company’s founding describes as motivating the founders to “keep payments secure, but also make them easy to use.” Kumar, an alumnus of the College of Engineering, Guindy in Chennai, had worked in software engineering before turning to payments; Ramanathan RV and Sheetal Lalwani joined him as co-founders, with Lalwani taking on the COO role. In a market where cash still dominated retail and digital payments were a rounding error, the founders bet that whoever fixed the invisible plumbing — not the checkout screen, but the handshake between banks that happens after a customer taps pay — would end up indispensable to everyone selling online in India.

The struggle years

Juspay spent its first several years as a conventional payment gateway integrator, plugging merchants like redBus, Snapdeal and Freecharge into banks and card networks, in a category that was rapidly turning into a price war. That business model had a ceiling: payment processing was commoditising, with more gateways competing on the same thin margins, and there was no obvious way to build a durable moat by being one more gateway among many. The bet that pulled Juspay out of that trap was also its riskiest: when the National Payments Corporation of India began building the Unified Payments Interface, Juspay committed years of engineering time to UPI infrastructure with no monetisation in sight and no guarantee the new rail would ever be adopted at scale. It was a multi-year period of building for a product that, at the time, had an uncertain future, funded by revenue from a shrinking-margin core business. The payoff was not obvious until UPI itself proved out: NPCI’s own account of the network’s first years shows monthly volumes going from roughly 2 million transactions in December 2016 to billions a month within a decade, but for Juspay in 2014 and 2015, that was still a bet rather than a result.

The turning point

The moment that changed Juspay’s trajectory was concrete and dated. In 2016, the National Payments Corporation of India asked Juspay to help build BHIM, the government’s own UPI app, on an extremely compressed timeline — by Vimal Kumar’s own account of the project, the working build came together in roughly three weeks of development inside a three-week sprint. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly promoted the app on television, BHIM logged 10 million downloads within about ten days, according to YourStory’s contemporaneous reporting on the app’s build team. That single engagement gave Juspay a foothold at the centre of India’s new payments rail just as UPI volumes began compounding, transforming years of unmonetised infrastructure work into a position as one of the few vendors NPCI and large consumer apps trusted to build and stabilise UPI plumbing at scale. Before BHIM, Juspay was a mid-sized gateway integrator competing on price against a dozen others; after it, Juspay was one of a handful of companies the ecosystem turned to when UPI itself needed to work under load — a position it has held, and defended, ever since.

The money behind it

Juspay has raised a little over $195 million across six disclosed rounds since 2015, according to a Crunchbase-based compilation of its funding history. Accel came in early, leading a $5.8 million Series A in February 2016 — right as the UPI bet was starting to pay off — and stayed on as an investor through later rounds. VEF (Vostok Emerging Finance), an emerging-markets fintech specialist, led the $21.6 million Series B in March 2020, with Wellington Management also participating; both returned for the $60 million Series C in December 2021, a round that valued Juspay at $460 million, per contemporaneous reporting from The Paypers. SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 backed that Series C and remained a shareholder into the company’s unicorn rounds. The step-change came in April 2025, when Kedaara Capital led a $60 million Series D, with SoftBank and Accel participating, pushing Juspay’s valuation past the $1 billion mark and making it, per YourStory’s January 2025 reporting on the deal, India’s first unicorn of that year. Less than a year later, in January 2026, WestBridge Capital led a further $50 million follow-on round — a mix of primary capital and secondary sales that let early investors and employees holding stock options cash out — at a $1.2 billion valuation, Juspay’s second liquidity event inside twelve months, as reported by Entrackr and Yahoo Finance.

How it makes money

Juspay does not charge merchants the way a traditional payment gateway does, by taking a cut of the merchant discount rate on every card or UPI transaction. Instead, it charges a platform or integration fee for the orchestration software itself — the routing logic, checkout SDKs, retry engine and analytics that sit on top of the underlying banks and gateways a merchant already uses. In its FY24 filings, reported by Entrackr, income from this “payment platform integration fee” grew 46% to ₹286.5 crore, with a further ₹32.8 crore coming from other operating activities, together making up the bulk of that year’s ₹319.32 crore in revenue. The model means Juspay’s costs are overwhelmingly people, not payment processing: employee benefit expenses were the single largest cost line, rising 41.7% to ₹303.36 crore in FY24 as the company scaled its engineering and reliability teams to keep pace with transaction growth. The part outsiders most often get wrong is Juspay’s position in the money flow — it is widely assumed to be “a payment gateway” or “an aggregator” holding merchant funds, when for most of its client base it is a technology vendor sitting above the gateways and banks, a distinction the company itself leaned on publicly in 2025 when it said merchants, not Juspay, make the actual routing decisions. Since obtaining an RBI payment aggregator licence in February 2024, and a cross-border aggregator licence reported in January 2026, Juspay now also has the option to act as an aggregator of record for a slice of its business, layering a second revenue model — closer to a conventional take rate — on top of the platform-fee business it built its name on.

The numbers

Juspay’s financial filings show a company that spent a decade investing ahead of revenue before its unit economics turned. Figures below are as filed with India’s Registrar of Companies and reported by Entrackr and filingbuddy; amounts are in ₹ crore.

Revenue nearly doubled between FY22 and FY23 (up 88.5%), grew a further 49.6% in FY24, and then jumped 61% in FY25 even as losses were being wound down each year — from ₹105.8 crore in FY23 to ₹97.5 crore in FY24 — before finally flipping to a ₹62.3 crore profit in FY25, the company’s first profitable year since its 2012 founding. Juspay’s own release describes FY25 profit before exceptional items and tax at ₹115 crore, a larger figure than the RoC-filed net profit; the gap likely reflects exceptional items and tax charges excluded from the company’s headline number, which is why this piece leads with the filed figure.

Where the money comes from

For most of its history, Juspay’s revenue has come almost entirely from India, and from a concentrated set of very large consumer internet clients rather than a long tail of small merchants — the FY24 filings show integration-fee income tied overwhelmingly to platform relationships with names like Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy and Google, rather than diversified small-merchant billing. The surprise is how recently that has started to change. In FY25, per the company’s own results release, Juspay opened new offices in San Francisco, Dublin, Dubai, São Paulo and Singapore, adding international clients including Agoda, Amadeus, HSBC, Tiket and Zurich Insurance alongside its Indian roster. That international push is now backed by regulation as much as ambition: the cross-border payment aggregator licence Juspay secured from the RBI, reported by Medianama in January 2026, lets it legally process inbound and outbound payments tied to the import and export of goods and services, a segment it could not touch under its earlier domestic-only licence. In other words, a company that spent a decade being almost entirely a bet on Indian UPI and e-commerce volume is now, deliberately, trying to become less dependent on any single geography or rail — even as India still supplies the overwhelming majority of the 300 million transactions it processes daily.

The risks

The most immediate risk is customer concentration meeting rising client ambition. In early 2025, Paytm, PhonePe, Razorpay and Cashfree all moved to process payments directly rather than route through Juspay’s layer, with Paytm’s cutover deadline set for 1 April 2025, as reported by Medianama. The stated reason — needing direct integration to ship their own innovations faster — is really a description of the mechanism: once a platform is large enough, it can afford to build the orchestration Juspay sells in-house, and Juspay’s own scale success is what taught its biggest customers how valuable that layer is. The second risk is regulatory dependence. Juspay’s ability to operate as an aggregator rests on RBI-issued licences it only obtained in February 2024 domestically and January 2026 for cross-border flows; the RBI’s willingness to tighten payment aggregator norms was on display when it restricted Paytm Payments Bank’s onboarding of new customers in early 2024, an action that reshaped competitive dynamics across the UPI ecosystem within weeks and is a reminder that a single regulatory order can move volumes overnight. The third risk is that Juspay’s profitability is one year old. FY25 was its first profitable year after thirteen consecutive years of losses, and that swing came alongside a period of unusually fast revenue growth (61% year on year); sustaining a profit while simultaneously funding new offices across the US, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America — the international expansion described in its own FY25 release — will test whether the FY25 numbers were a genuine structural shift or a favourable single year.

The takeaway

Juspay’s most transferable lesson is that infrastructure businesses can win by being the thing nobody wants to build themselves — right up until their customers get big enough to want exactly that. Betting on UPI for years with no revenue looked, at the time, like the kind of unfocused, low-conviction spending that kills startups; instead it put Juspay inside the one payment rail that would come to dominate Indian commerce, and the BHIM engagement converted that positioning into trust it has spent a decade compounding. But the same growth that made Juspay indispensable to Paytm, PhonePe, Razorpay and Cashfree also made its playbook visible and, eventually, replicable by those same customers. The lesson is not “build critical infrastructure and you are safe” — it is that being critical infrastructure buys time, not permanence, and what a company does with that time, in Juspay’s case pushing into cross-border licensing, Hyperswitch and new geographies before its largest domestic clients could fully internalise its playbook, determines whether the next decade looks like the last one.

Frequently asked questions

What does Juspay actually do?

Juspay builds software that sits between a merchant’s checkout and the banks, card networks and UPI apps behind it, routing each transaction across multiple gateways to reduce failures and improve success rates, rather than acting as a single payment gateway itself.

Is Juspay a payment gateway or a payment aggregator?

Historically it operated as a technology vendor selling orchestration software on a platform-fee model, not a fund-holding aggregator. Since receiving an RBI payment aggregator licence in February 2024, and a cross-border aggregator licence reported in January 2026, it can also act as a licensed aggregator for parts of its business.

How much is Juspay worth as of 2026?

Juspay was valued at $1.2 billion following a $50 million funding round led by WestBridge Capital in January 2026, up from just over $1 billion (reported as roughly $900 million to $1.24 billion depending on the source) after its April 2025 Series D led by Kedaara Capital.

Is Juspay profitable?

Yes, for the first time in FY25. Regulatory filings reported by Entrackr show a net profit of ₹62.3 crore on ₹514 crore of revenue, ending 13 straight years of losses; Juspay’s own release cites a larger pre-exceptional, pre-tax profit figure of ₹115 crore for the same year.

Why did Paytm, PhonePe, Razorpay and Cashfree stop using Juspay?

In early 2025 all four moved to process payments directly instead of routing through Juspay’s third-party layer, citing a need to ship their own product changes faster without depending on an intermediary — a shift Medianama reported ahead of Paytm’s 1 April 2025 cutover deadline.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• YourStory, “SoftBank-backed Juspay eyes 2025’s first unicorn”, January 2025
• Entrackr, “Juspay raises $50 Mn from WestBridge Capital at $1.2 Bn valuation”, January 2026
• Yahoo Finance, “India’s Juspay secures $50m in follow-on funding at $1.2bn valuation”, January 2026
• Entrackr (Fintrackr), “SoftBank-backed Juspay revenue spikes 50% to Rs 319 Cr in FY24”, November 2024
• filingbuddy, “The fintech startup Juspay doubles revenue to INR 213.3 cr”, 2024 (FY22–FY23 filings)
• Juspay newsroom, “Juspay Reports Record Profitability with a Strong 61% YoY Revenue Growth in FY25”, 2025
• Inc42, Juspay company financials page, 2026
• Medianama, “Paytm Ends Third-Party Integration; How Does Juspay Respond?”, March 2025
• Medianama, “Exclusive: Juspay Secures Cross-Border PA Licence from the RBI”, January 2026
• YourStory, “Zoho and Juspay receive RBI payment aggregator license”, February 2024
• The Paypers, “JusPay raises USD 60 mln in Series C funding round”, December 2021
• Clay (Crunchbase-based funding compilation), “How Much Did JUSPAY Raise? Funding & Key Investors”, 2026
• The Fintech Times, “Behind the Idea: Juspay”, founding-story feature
• YourStory, “How 27-year-old Nikhil Kumar and team built the BHIM app”, February 2017
• Vimal Kumar, “JUSPAY — How Building BHIM in 3 weeks, pushed us into Functional Programming”, Speaker Deck (founder talk)
• Hyperswitch (Juspay), “About Hyperswitch — Open Source Payment Orchestration Platform”, product page, 2026

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