India’s digital economy scaled fast, but paying online didn’t always keep up. With strict security requirements and inconsistent user experiences, businesses faced real challenges in offering smooth, reliable payments.
Juspay launched almost 13 years ago to address exactly that: building infrastructure that could handle scale, meet regulation and work for everyone. More than a decade later, the company supports hundreds of millions of transactions each day and is currently expanding its open-source payments platform Hyperswitch to new markets.
In this week’s Behind the Idea, we speak to Sheetal Lalwani, COO and co-founder, about Juspay’s origins, lessons learned from working on UPI and why the company is betting on open source and AI as it scales globally.
Tell us more about your company and its offering
Juspay was founded in India in 2012 with a clear goal: to make digital payments more seamless, without compromising on security. We work primarily with large online businesses – what we call merchants – such as Amazon, Swiggy and Google.
Our platform helps them manage their full payments stack: from custom checkout journeys and integration with multiple providers, to smart routing, compliance, and analytics. In many cases, we effectively become the merchant’s payments team, so they don’t need to build that capability in-house.
Juspay processes around 200 million payment transactions per day in India. We support both global companies operating in India, such as Google and Microsoft, as well as major Indian platforms like Swiggy, Ola and BigBasket.
We’re also expanding internationally, with teams now in Singapore, Dublin, São Paulo and San Mateo, California.
What problem was your company set up to solve?
In 2011, India made two-factor authentication mandatory for digital payments. Every transaction had to be verified twice: entering card details and then confirming via a one-time password sent to the customer’s phone. It added strong security but also made payments more cumbersome.
At the time, most of the world was still focused on removing friction. India had taken the opposite approach.
We believed there was a way to do both: keep payments secure, but also make them easy to use. That challenge became our starting point. Our early products focused on making two-factor authentication feel seamless, and that principle still shapes how we build today.
Since launch, how has your company evolved?
We began by solving one specific problem, making two-factor authentication smoother. But as our customers grew, so did their needs. Over time, we built a full-stack payments platform to support everything from checkout design and orchestration to routing logic, compliance, and analytics.
Different industries require different payment flows. A food delivery app might prioritise one-click checkout, while a subscription service may need to optimise for recurring billing. We built a modular system to support that variety.
Another major shift has been international expansion, not just in where we operate, but in how we design our products. We’re now active in Singapore, Dublin, São Paulo and San Mateo, and we’re building tools that can adapt to new regulatory, technical and commercial environments.
That’s what led to Hyperswitch, our open-source payments orchestration platform. It brings together a decade of technical and operational knowledge into a system that gives businesses full control over their payments infrastructure, enabling them to integrate with multiple providers, route payments efficiently and scale without lock-in.
What has been the biggest challenge or most ‘tricky moment’ to overcome?
One moment that stands out was our early involvement with UPI – India’s national real-time payments system. At the time, it wasn’t a product. It was just a concept in a Word document shared by someone closely involved in its design.
Our founder, Vimal Kumar, saw the potential straight away. He said it was the kind of system he’d always wanted to build, and if someone else was already working on it, he wanted to help make it happen.
We ended up investing four years into building infrastructure for UPI with no monetisation, at a time when its future wasn’t certain. That decision turned out to be a defining one. Today, UPI is one of the largest real-time payment systems in the world, and Juspay powers a significant part of it.
That experience reinforced our belief in long-term thinking and the importance of committing to foundational work, even when the payoff isn’t immediate.
The journey hasn’t been a straight line – sometimes we’ve gone forward, backward, sideways. But we’ve stayed on the path, guided by our principles and by solving real-world problems.
What are your biggest achievements or ‘proudest moment’ so far?
Funding rounds are important milestones, but they’ve never been our end goal. What we’re proud of is the scale and consistency of the value we’ve created.
Around eight years ago, we set a goal internally: that every Indian making a digital payment would touch one of our products in some way. Today, that’s more or less the case.
We built key components of the UPI authentication layer, and we now process more than 200 million transactions a day. That kind of scale, reaching tens of millions of users every day, isn’t something that happened overnight. It reflects a long-term focus on building infrastructure that works and keeps working.
How would you describe the culture of your company?
Our culture is anchored around value creation. One of our oldest internal principles is: ‘Do more with less’. We’re inspired by people who create value from very little – scientists, musicians, software engineers – and that mindset has shaped how we think and work.
We talk about the three Ps: people, platforms and problems. We aim to hire talented people, give them meaningful challenges, and support them with the right tools and systems.
We’ve also learned how to balance creativity with scale. Innovation often emerges from experimentation and chaos, while scale needs structure. We’ve taken inspiration from ideas like the ‘chaordic organisation’ – knowing when to decentralise and when to unify.
And above all, we believe in long-term thinking. Businesses that extract too much value early can lose trust. We aim to leave value on the table: for our customers, our partners and our team.
What’s in store for the future?
Two big focus areas are guiding us forward: open source and AI.
As we enter new markets like the US and Europe, we’ve had to think carefully about how to build trust. Open source has given us a way to do that quickly and credibly. Hyperswitch is fully open-source, and we’ve built it to give businesses control and visibility: removing the constraints of black-box systems.
We’re also investing heavily in AI. Over the past year, we’ve gone back to the basics, revisiting the fundamentals, learning from open knowledge ecosystems and building internal tools. AI is already improving how our teams build, and we’re exploring how it can help us deliver much more value, faster
If AI delivers a 10x productivity gain across the board, we’re asking how we can deliver 100x value for our customers.
Open infrastructure and intelligent systems are where we see payments going, and that’s where we’re building next.
