Razorpay acquires Pune-based iZealiant Technologies to strengthen payment solutions to banks

Razorpay Founders Harshil Mathur & Shashank Kumar

In its fifth acquisition, payments and neobanking platform Razorpay has acquired Pune-based payments solutions provider iZealiant Technologies, the company said on March 16. Razorpay did not disclose the amount of the acquisition.

Founded in 2015 by former Mastercard executive Prashant Mengawade, IZealiant is a Pune-based startup that provides mobile-first, API-enabled, and cloud-ready payment processing products for banks and financial institutions. The company’s offering ties in with Razorpay’s products in its banking solutions arm which provides payments solutions to partner banks and other financial institutions.

Harshil Mathur, CEO and Co-founder of Razorpay said in a statement, “I am confident that strong forces of two technology companies coming together like this will empower our partner banks with the necessary support in building next-gen solutions. The team at IZealiant has extensive experience in developing and implementing complex, high-performance acquiring and issuing systems and I am confident that together we will be able to build industry-first solutions for the banks in India.”

Razorpay works with over 45 banks in India and offers products that help banks comply with new regulations by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The company’s products include Razorpay TokenHQ – a multi-network RBI compliant card tokenisation solution, and MandateHQ - the API-based, plug-n-play recurring payments interface for banks.

In the last seven years, IZealiant has deployed its ZealPro product suite for more than 50 banks across 18 countries, including India, South Africa, Nepal, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Singapore, Uganda, among others.

"With IZealiant’s payment banking knowledge and expertise, together they can build simple, quick and secure products and support banks with a tech infrastructure that can create a frictionless payment experience for customers and businesses," Razorpay said.

The IZealiant Team will continue to work out of Pune and through this acquisition, Razorpay will expand its headcount by establishing an office in Pune, the company said.

Prashant Mengawade, founder and CEO of IZealiant said, “We are delighted to join hands with Razorpay and be part of their growth journey. The timing couldn’t have been better as financial institutions are increasingly looking to adopt advanced, flexible, and secure solutions to meet ever-evolving customer needs.”

This marks Razorpay’s fifth acquisition; prior to this, Razorpay had announced the acquisition of Malaysia-based fintech firm Curlec at a valuation of $20 million in its first international purchase.

Before that, Razorpay acquired AI-based risk tech and SaaS platform TERA Finlabs in 2021, payroll and HR management platform Opfin in 2019 and fraud analytics AI-platform Thirdwatch in 2018.

Founded by IIT Roorkee alumni Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar in 2014, Razorpay became the second most valued fintech in India after Paytm following its largest-ever funding round of $375 million in December 2021. The round more than doubled the company’s valuation to $7.5 billion.

The startup’s valuation grew by 7x from $1 billion in just one year, underscoring the huge momentum in the funding environment.

The startup counts Facebook, Ola, Zomato, Swiggy, Cred and others as its customers and achieved $60 billion in Total Payment Volumes (TPV) as of early December 2021.

The company clocked over 300 percent growth year-on-year, for the second year in a row and plans to achieve $90 billion in TPV by the end of 2022. TPV refers to the total value of payments and reversals executed on a payments platform, in this case across Razorpay's payment gateway, neobank and other products.

According to a report, Razorpay turned profitable in FY21 with a net profit of Rs 7 crore on a standalone basis.