Razorpay hires Ola Money architect Amit Saini as engineering head

By Binu Paul

  • 05 Apr 2017
Credit: Thinkstock

Amit Saini, former director of engineering at cab-hailing services company Ola, has joined payment gateway startup Razorpay as vice president, engineering.

 

Saini will oversee growth and product development at Razorpay, the company said in a statement.

“We’re growing at a phenomenal scale of 20x year-on-year. Amit will help us tackle the ever-increasing challenges of a diverse merchant ecosystem in a dynamic financial market like India,” Harshil Mathur, CEO and co-founder, Razorpay, said.

Up until last month, Saini was heading the engineering efforts at Ola. He was instrumental in building Ola Money, the taxi aggregator's digital wallet. Before Ola, he has worked with names like Microsoft, IBM and Apigee, building software for e-commerce, web services, Big Data and analytics. He also co-founded SkillCafe, a predictive analytics engine that provides career growth recommendations.

“My charter is to continue building a world-class engineering team that is focused on innovating, troubleshooting and creating the best fin-tech solutions in the market”, Saini said.

Razorpay, owned by Razorpay Software Pvt. Ltd, was the second Indian company to be selected for the Y Combinator accelerator programme. It was founded by IIT-Roorkee alumni Shashank Kumar and Harshil Mathur.

The company, which helps businesses accept online payments via credit/debit cards, netbanking and mobile wallets, has over 5,000 merchants, including Papa John’s, Knowlarity, Chai Point, Nestaway and Eatfresh, among others.

It competes with well-funded players such as PayU, CCAvenue and MobiKwik in India.

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.

Razorpay had appointed Karan Sarin, former marketing head at smartphone maker OnePlus India, as its chief marketing officer in September last year.

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