In 2014, Sheetal Lalwani had a job at Bloomberg that most people would have kept. She left it to join a two-year-old payments startup in Bengaluru that few had heard of, run by a former Amazon engineer named Vimal Kumar.
The company was Juspay. It had been started in 2012 by Kumar and Ramanathan RV, at a time when India's online payments were a mess. Cards failed, banks timed out, and every merchant had to fight the same fight alone. Juspay's pitch was unglamorous: build the layer in between, and make the failures disappear.
Cards failed, banks timed out, and every merchant had to fight the same fight alone.
The public record is thin on the personal side. We do not know where the founders grew up, what their parents said, or what their first office looked like. What the record does show is how slow the early years were. An early cheque of around Rs 40 crore came from the founders of Accel and BookMyShow, money meant for product, not marketing. For years Juspay sold to other companies, not to consumers, which meant no app downloads to boast about and no brand to speak of.
The nobody-noticed part is that the business was growing underneath. Amazon, Flipkart, Google, Swiggy, IndiGo and HSBC became clients. When the government's UPI system took off, Juspay already had the stack to sit under it, and it now says it handles more than 300 million transactions a day.
There was a price. In 2019 co-founder Ramanathan RV left. In FY24 the company lost Rs 97.5 crore. In February 2024 the RBI finally granted it a payment aggregator licence, letting it move from advising merchants to moving their money itself.
Then the numbers turned. In FY25, operating revenue rose 61 percent to Rs 514 crore, and a Rs 97.5 crore loss became a Rs 62.3 crore profit. In January 2026 WestBridge Capital led a $50 million round at a $1.2 billion valuation, making Juspay the first unicorn of the year. Part of that money bought out early investors and employees who had waited more than a decade.
Lalwani has said the aim is to build a global payments company from India with a billion dollars in revenue. It is a big sentence for a company most users have never heard of, even though they have probably paid through it.
For a first-time founder the lesson is a quiet one. Some companies are built in the places nobody sees: between two other companies, behind an interface someone else owns. The reward is slow and the credit goes elsewhere, but twelve years later the plumbing is worth a billion dollars.