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Shashank Kumar

Founder, Razorpay

Shashank Kumar is the Co-Founder and Managing Director at Razorpay, an Indian financial technology platform that provides end-to-end payment solutions for businesses to accept, process, and disburse payments.124 He is also known by the nickname "shk".4 Razorpay aims to simplify the payment process for online businesses and e-commerce platforms.2

Career:

  • Razorpay Kumar co-founded Razorpay in May 2014.5 He transitioned from Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to Managing Director (MD) in July 2022.3 Razorpay provides payment solutions, a neo-banking platform named RazorpayX, and a lending platform called Razorpay Capital.25
  • Microsoft Prior to Razorpay, Kumar worked as a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft from October 2012 to May 2014.1 He also held an internship there from May 2011 to July 2011.1
  • SDSLabs Kumar was the Vice President at SDSLabs from August 2010 to May 2012.1
  • University of Minnesota Kumar held a research internship at the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Minnesota from May 2010 to July 2010.1

Education:

  • Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee Kumar is an alumnus of IIT Roorkee.67
  • Y Combinator Kumar attended Y Combinator in 2015.3
  • St. Xavier's High School, Patna He attended St. Xavier's High School, Patna from 1997 to 2006.3

Achievements and Initiatives:

  • Startup of the Year In December 2022, Razorpay won the Startup of the Year award from the Economic Times.1
  • Digitizing Businesses Kumar aims to digitize millions of businesses in India and Southeast Asia through Razorpay.4
  • Razorpay Rize He is also working to incubate over 100,000 businesses in India with Razorpay Rize.4
  • Mars Shot Kumar is seeding new-age tech startups that can create disruption through Mars Shot.4

Highlights

May 18 · twitter

We recently built an AI assistant inside @Razorpay called Slash. It reads our entire codebase, debugs production incidents, reviews specs, writes code, reviews every single PR, answer tech queries and also raises PRs for small features.

It's easily accessible through Slack. We can tag it in any Slack thread, describe the problem in English, and it gets to work.

Six weeks ago, Slash handled 122 tasks in its first week. Last week it handled 14000+. Queries, analysis, bug fixes, PR reviews, test runs and work that earlier lived across scattered tools and teams can now be done with Slash right within Slack. 1000+ people used it in a single week because it got their work done faster. The whole adoption has been completely organic.

The numbers from last week have been very encouraging - 14,854 tasks completed. 2,150 PRs raised, 1,152 merged, 45% of those PRs shipped with zero human rework.

A payout gets stuck mid-retry during a live incident, an engineer tags Slash and within seconds, it cross-references logs with code and pinpoints a state machine bug blocking the retry-to-failed state transition. Tells the team exactly which logs to check and how to resolve the incident.

With its K8s analyzer skill, Slash scanned a single namespace, right-sized all 11 workers using 48-hour P95 pod metrics, and raised the PR. One run saved $560/month.

A marketing banner bug was fixed with few prompt iterations with a PR raised, merged to prod and deployed in minutes. No front-end developer touched the code.

Security teams ran static security testing and remediation through Slash at org scale. Thousands of findings were purged and many more got validated autonomously.

But Slash isn't just an engineering tool.

Account managers now trace stuck customer payments and integration failures through Slash instead of pinging engineers on Slack. L2 product support tickets get triaged by Slash before they reach engineering.

250+ non-engineers ran thousands of sessions last week. PMs used it for research on our payments infra, customer interviews and product features sometimes raising PRs of their own. Analytics teams built SQL pipelines. 11% of all sessions came from people outside tech and product.

On our company bakkar (watercooler) Slack thread, someone asked Slash jokingly to assign tasks to everyone and it responded in the same tone. It seamlessly started participating in inside jokes and conversations.

The quality compounds with use. Engineers who shipped 11+ Slash PRs averaged a 63% merge rate without rework. First-timers averaged 37%. Across the org, human review comments per PR have dropped more than 40% with Slash starting to do in-depth review of every single change.

We're still early. Large cross-repo refactors, fully agentic sdlc and plan mode are next. But Slash has already changed how people at Razorpay build, debug, and ship every day.

We recently built an AI assistant inside @Razorpay called Slash. 
It reads our entire codebase, debu
Dec 8 · twitter

A few months back, we went live with @apple Pay for International Payments on @Razorpay. What always excites me for these launches isn’t just the new product or feature, but the impact they create for the businesses:

🚀 15,000+ brands already live with Apple Pay checkout ⚡️ Checkout time: 2 minutes → 25 seconds 📊 Success rate: 95%+ 🫶 50% customers in Middle East, 25% in US/Europe opting for Apple Pay 🔒 0 fraud chargebacks so far

For global customers, this means a seamless, trusted way to pay. For our brands and businesses, it means more completed orders and fewer drop-offs.

Small changes in the product can unlock outsized impact for millions of customers. And there’s a lot more coming!

A few months back, we went live with @apple Pay for International Payments on @Razorpay. What always
Sep 28 · yourstory.com
Razorpay Co-founder Shashank Kumar on building products that win
Aug 29 · hindustantimes.com
Youngest Indian billionaires on Hurun Rich List 2024 - Razorpay ...
Apr 23 · Business Today
Razorpay launches UPI infrastructure in collaboration with Airtel Payments Bank; check details here - Business Today
Razorpay launches UPI infrastructure in collaboration with Airtel Payments Bank; check details here
Apr 17 · contactout.com
Shashank Kumar Email & Phone Number - ContactOut
Apr 16 · Business Standard
Wealth management, entertainment, health spends grow in FY24: Razorpay - Business Standard
Wealth management, entertainment, health spends grow in FY24: Razorpay - Business Standard
Razorpay Business Breakdown & Founding Story - Contrary Research
Nov 7 · ycombinator.com
Razorpay: India's only full-stack financial solutions company for ...
Dec 24 · youtube.com
From Idea To UNICORN | FO16 Raj Shamani - YouTube
From Idea To UNICORN | FO16 Raj Shamani - YouTube

Related Questions

What are some of the key initiatives Shashank Kumar is leading at Razorpay?
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Can you tell me more about Razorpay's Mars Shot initiative?
What challenges did Shashank Kumar face while developing Razorpay's payment gateway?
Shashank Kumar
Shashank Kumar, photo 1
Shashank Kumar, photo 2
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Location

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India