CEO & Co-Founder, Razorpay
Razorpay’s Founder started coding again after 6 years | Harshil Mathur, CEO Razorpay
For six years, Harshil Mathur's GitHub was mostly inactive.
Then, in the last three months, it turned completely green.
Why? Because AI crossed a critical threshold—from being a helpful assistant to becoming an execution engine.
In this conversation, Razorpay Co-founder Harshil Mathur shares how he and the team spent months rethinking and rebuilding key parts of Razorpay for an AI-first world. From onboarding and integrations to customer support and dashboards, every customer touchpoint was reimagined with a simple question:
If you were starting your company today, knowing what AI can do,...
About Harshil Mathur
Harshil Mathur, CEO and co-founder of Razorpay, said in a May 2026 interview that he returned to coding after a six-year hiatus because he believes artificial intelligence has crossed a threshold from being an assistant to becoming an "execution engine" or "co-worker." He stated that after testing newer AI models in late December or early January, he and co-founder Shashank Kumar concluded that the technology "changes everything" and decided to rebuild Razorpay's customer-facing systems—including onboarding, support, integrations, and dashboards—as if starting the company from scratch with AI capabilities. Mathur said the company now grades employees on their "AI potential" using levels L1 through L5, and has told those at L1 to L3 that they need to move to L4 or L5. In a separate interview, Mathur discussed Razorpay's response during a financial crisis, recalling that when a bank freeze occurred, the company chose to pay out its thousand smaller customers before its ten largest ones, saying the large customers "can manage without the money" while the small ones "were going to die tomorrow." He described this as a reflection of the company's values, adding that for founders, "the things that really matter to the company the founder has to get into themselves." Mathur also said that India never fully adopted the SaaS wave because SaaS requires business owners to change their workflow, whereas AI tools can integrate more naturally into existing processes.
Transcript (34 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Harshil Mathur0:00
So if I were to start Razorpay today, how would I build it? Knowing that this technology exists. I said how is our onboarding going to look like? How would our support look like? How would our integration look like? How would our dashboard look like? How everything that customer interacts with look like? I said and we realized that it's going to be completely different. Everything has to completely change. I said let's do that.
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Interviewer0:28
Maybe after like 7-8 years I've seen you become so energized with tech where you are. You know, what I hear from everyone around you is that you have locked yourself in a room and you're building. And I know you founded this, formed this two-member hacker team, which is sort of just building building building. So talk about that, how you embraced it.
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Harshil Mathur0:45
Yeah, I know. I think I think everybody has been using AI and ChatGPT, but in November or December the newer models started rolling in. And I think I tried for the first time in late December or early Jan the newer models from the model companies. And something changed, right? I think it became from AI being an assistant to AI being an execution engine or AI is a co-worker.
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Interviewer1:08
It took over, right?
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Harshil Mathur1:09
Yeah, the model was smart enough that it didn't need guidance. It didn't need for you to tell it to do this and do that. The tool calling became so amazing. I remember I tried OpenClaw for the first time around end of Jan and I set it up and I was like wow, this is just going to change the world. And not just the product itself, but this capability now that the model has that you can really trust the model with hardcore execution end to end. You create a plan with it, you tell it what it needs to do. I think that intelligence on the fly, like an execution intelligence on the fly, was just mind-blowing. I for the first time started picking up and building products myself. I think after 6 years maybe. And started building stuff with it. Started tinkering with it. Started using it to set up an agent to do meeting review notes for me. So I started using it to do a diet plan for me and being a dietitian for me and all of that. I just started doing a bunch of stuff. After I set up OpenClaw, for 3 to 4 or 5 days, people in the office said I don't know where you are but you are completely distracted because I couldn't focus on work at all. I was just logged into this testing its limits, testing what it can do, testing what I can do with it. And it just blew my mind. After that I moved to Cursor and all of that. But I think what fundamentally became clear to me is that this changes everything and there's no point of saying that the world is going to be the same. So after a couple of weeks from there, we sat down in a room, me and Shashank said, if this is where it's going to head, we don't want to wait to get disrupted or something like this. So if I were to start Razorpay now, how would I build it knowing that this technology exists? I said how is our onboarding going to look like? How would our support look like? How would our integration look like? How would our dashboard look like? How everything that customer interacts with look like? And we realized that it's going to be completely different. Everything has to completely change. We said let's do that. So we worked for the next 2 or 3 months, we just said let's completely rebuild everything. And the FTX we launched it, which was everything from onboarding to integration to support to dashboard. We completely changed it. And it is not easy because there's a lot of love for what we have built as well, like you are proud of it.
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Interviewer3:30
Why can't I go to a chat Razorpay chatbot and say set up my business online?
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Harshil Mathur3:35
Yeah, and that's what you do now.
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Interviewer3:36
That's what it is.
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Harshil Mathur3:37
Oh we can.
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Interviewer3:37
That's what it is now.
That is onboarding.
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Harshil Mathur3:40
But I think just for the audience to know, ChatGPT brought AI to the masses. OpenClaw is probably a bigger disruption when it comes to workflow for the masses.
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Interviewer3:52
Anybody can build their workflow.
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Harshil Mathur3:53
Yeah, open source. It's like the World Wide Web movement, right? It's not about the itself. It's what it represents. It represents that the model has reached the power where you can trust it with the execution.
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Interviewer4:06
And you can do it with Cursor, Claude code equivalent.
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Harshil Mathur4:08
You can do it anywhere. You can use Claude code, you can use Cursor, you can use API and build your own harness. It doesn't really matter. The model is the power here. The model has reached that potential that you can now trust it with long-form execution. It has become a habit for me. Every evening I create a whole plan with my Claude code and leave it jobs for the night. These are the five things you have to do before I wake up, right? And it does it completely on its own. In the morning it's there. Maybe there's one bug, maybe there's two bugs, maybe sometimes it's completely perfect. The point is it's almost there. And that power that this represents is just amazing.
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Interviewer4:41
What do they do to jobs?
How should people react?
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Harshil Mathur4:47
Yeah, we're having the same conversations in our company, right? I think we have pushed the entire company now. In every review we are grading people on their AI potential. L1, L2, L3, L4, L5. And I'm telling everyone who's in L1 to L3 that hey, you guys need to move to L4, L5. You can't be at L1 to L3.
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Interviewer5:04
And the beauty is they can self-train. They have to just go and ask.
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Harshil Mathur5:08
The best thing is with AI, for example in open source, half of the things that I build are by asking it, what more can you do for me? Because you know it better than I can. So what more can you do for me? And they'll tell me five best ideas and I'll pick one and then build with it. Same with Claude code now. I ask it like, hey, I want to do something this weekend. What do you think I should do?
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Interviewer5:25
So there's no excuse not to upskill yourself. Everybody going forward living in the world of AI. The word builder was generally associated with more geeky, techish people. All of us are engineers. Everybody's going to be a...
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Harshil Mathur5:41
Yeah, I can tell you about my GitHub profile. The last time it was green was in 2015. And the last 3 months it has fully been green.
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Interviewer5:49
What does that mean? That you are submitting a lot of...
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Harshil Mathur5:52
If you're constantly shipping commits then it becomes... I'm not faking it, I'm just saying real. It has become green in the last 20-30 days since I've been fully on this because it's just shipping, it's just fun. The things I'm building have nothing to do with this.
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Interviewer6:04
People don't realize it'll be so much fun.
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Harshil Mathur6:06
So much fun, it's like a video game.
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Interviewer6:07
All your tedious routine things that irritate you, just try them with AI.
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Harshil Mathur6:14
Yeah.
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Interviewer6:14
It'll change your life. And I know you are doing a lot of it. I know he's doing a lot of it.
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Harshil Mathur6:17
No but he is on steroids. For you it was a 6-year hiatus, for him it was a 25-year hiatus.
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Interviewer6:27
And he started building.
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Harshil Mathur6:27
I don't know, it's like any lot of tech founders like me. You started with tech. The reason you got into this space is because you liked doing tech, you liked building. Over time you have to scale the company and the tech part takes a lot of time so you move away from tech. I think this is the best time for everyone to return back to tech. If you liked coding at any point in your life, you'll love it when you pick it up now because it's just so much faster. I was speaking about SDS, right? Now look at it, if this existed, what I spent like 1 year building in SDS, I could have built it in a day. I could have built it in 5 minutes. It's just amazing. We spent 4 years whatever we built in the 4 years of college at SDS, it could now be built in a week.
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Interviewer7:04
I hope all of you can just hear the animation and the enthusiasm in his voice, but that's sort of how you feel about tech.