WEF Davos 2025: Razorpay to shell out over Rs 860 crore for ‘ghar wapsi’

WEF 2025: Harshil Mathur, CEO and co-founder of Razorpay said that India today is the best market for a tech IPO, and that investors too want the company to be based in India. Mathur said that there is a significant tax component attached to the flipping that they have planned, which he said was a “small price” in the long run. 

While not giving out the exact figure, Mathur divulged that they are expecting a tax component of over Rs 860 crore for returning to India. Speaking to Business Today TV at the World Economic Forum 2025 in  Davos, Mathur said, “There's a significant tax component that will come our way. But I think in the larger scheme of things, given India is our home market, that's a small price to pay. It's not a small cost but it's a small price to pay. I can’t give an exact number because it depends on the final numbers and how the market value is, but it could be in the range of somewhere between $100-$300 million (Rs 860-2,500 crore).” 

Speaking about why they decided to base Razorpay out of the US, Mathur said when the company was started 10 years back, it was hard for foreign investors to invest in Indian structured companies because they did not understand the regulations and complications of the market. “At the same time, there was no public tech IPO market in India 10 years back, so it was hard for investors to believe that they would get an exit in the Indian market. That’s why companies like ours are structured either as a US company or a Singapore company – for us it was US,” he said.

Mathur added that now the sentiments have changed and investors want to come to India. “In the last 3-4 years, that sentiment has completely flipped over. India is today the best market for public tech IPOs. The success of a lot of IPOs over the last couple of years, combined with efforts by the government to simplify Ease of Doing Business, as well as the trust that foreign investors are starting to have in India’s regulations, legal systems, legal frameworks have been a big driver,” he explained.

The Razorpay co-founder said that investors also want them to be based out of India because it is their home market where everybody knows and loves them. “There's no point in us doing an IPO in any other market so we want to go public in India and that's the reason we decided to flip back,” said Mathur.

Elaborating on Razorpay’s plans to go public and the expected timeline, Mathur said it is likely to take at least two more years. “I think we'll at least take two more years to go public. Our payment business is profitable and doing well but there are a lot of newer business lines that we have in the offline world in the international market on Razorpay side that we want to continue to grow. I think those will take at least a year from here to go profitable and with that we'll go public in the next two years.”