The flourishing digital economy of India has yielded numerous fintech success stories; yet, hardly any can be as discreetly powerful as Cashfree Payments. Cashfree was founded by two engineers, Akash Sinha and Reeju Datta, who were passionate about solving a niche problem and simplifying payments, and has since grown into one of the most trusted payment infrastructure firms in the country. Its foundation in Bengaluru and aspirations to become globally recognised give Cashfree a perfect example of how clarity of thinking by founders, a developer-first mentality, and marry relentless approach can turn a startup into a fintech powerhouse.
The Origin Story: From a Simple Idea to a Fintech Disruptor
In 2015, when the digital payments scene in India was gaining momentum due to demonetisation and the emergence of UPI, two friends, Akash Sinha and Reeju Datta, began to work to solve a long-lasting problem: cash-on-delivery (COD) payments. Akash, a graduate of IIIT Hyderabad and with experience of interning at Amazon and BankBazaar, knew the technical loopholes in the system. Reeju, an IIT Kharagpur graduate who was driven by the overall outlook of marketing, would scan the user issues.
They developed a rough prototype: An SMS payment link which allowed delivery executives to collect payments in a digital format at the doorstep. In a span of six months, they registered about 300 offline merchants in Bengaluru which was a clear indicator to a bigger opportunity that was thereby lying in front of them awaiting them to explore the same to their benefit and to the benefit of the people of the place where they were about to turn into a place of greatness in the days to come!
Meet the Founders: Akash and Reeju
The company is headed and founded by Akash Sinha, who is an alumnus of IIIT Hyderabad and the brains behind Cashfree, with his tech and technological experience. Before founding Cashfree, Akash was an employee at Amazon, which gave him practical experience in payments infrastructure and fraud detection systems. He was aware of inefficiencies in payment flows, was thinking about the iterations of that, and especially in Indian evolving digital economy, what Cashfree develops was a developer-first product approach to benefit from these inefficiencies.
Co-founder and growth strategist Reeju Datta graduated as an engineer from IIT Kharagpur. The journey in consumer behaviour and product strategy assisted Cashfree in having a quick scaling in the fintech space. When Akash was busy constructing the rails, Reeju worked on getting businesses to hop on board.
Fueling the Ascent: Funding & Validation:
The path of Cashfree was milled with milestone memories:
- 2015-16: The first category of seed and angel investment, fast product pivots.
- 2017: It enters Y Combinator, so it is accelerated further
- 2018-20: Smilegate and PayPal Series A; creation of Bulk Payouts, Auto Collect.
- 2021: the strategic minority investment of SBI; the number of merchants increased significantly, to 130k in a year or so, compared with 70k previously.
- 2025: The series C round of $53 million was led by Krafton (and co-led by SBI, Apis Partners), with the valuation being increased to $700 million. Cashfree was the first company in India to receive a cross-border payment aggregation license by the RBI in addition to funding.
It was not only a financial flow of capital, but it also institutionalised key alliances, regulatory status, and international position.
Scaling Up: Products and Reach
The current Cashfree is a highly optimised payment engine:
- A portal which processes 100+ local and international versions.
- Salary payments, settlements to vendors, refunds Payments to more than 30 million bank accounts every month
- Auto Collect facilitates the virtual account reconciliation.
- Subscriptions, BNPL, UPI Flash, cross-border payments, and SecureID with 1 Billion+ KYC verifications
This suite is capable of consistently meeting peak requirements – a maximum of 12,000 TPS – and has claimed more than 50% of the market share in pay-out processing. Major verticals such as D2C e-commerce, logistics, fintech, SaaS, travel, etc, have all come to rely on Cashfree today.
Founder Philosophy: “Move Fast, Solve Real Problems”
Akash has a catch phrase that goes something like, “Speed is a feature”. This is a principle by which the Cashfree team exists, not only in as little as 5 minutes to onboard merchants but also automating the KYC process, and investing days to launch UPI-ready solutions.
Their in-house culture is based upon:
- Customer Obsession: The Edge-case solutions to the Indian businesses of all scales
- Agility: Rapid scaling up of products as per feedback given by developers
- Reliability: 99.99% uptime, PCI-DSS level one compliance
The persistence has seen Cashfree stand out in terms of its merchant NPS and customer retention, which are above most legacy competitors.
Paying Off: Domestic Leadership and International Growth
As soon as the doors were opened by the RBI, Cashfree started growing in several spheres:
- The footprint in Tier II/III also went up substantially Domestic footprint across Tier II/III reached approximately 130,000 merchants in 2021.
- Expansion across the globe to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Canada, and the US, cross-border license and payment rails made it possible.
- Integration with Shopify, WooCommerce and WhatsApp connector as well as business tools.
- Awards and honours: Deloitte Tech Fast 50 India, Fintech Product of the Year, Best Payment Aggregator (CNBC), being included in the CB Insights Fintech 250, and being on YC’s Top Companies list.
What’s Next: Infrastructure for the Next Trillion Dollars
Even though Cashfree has been doing relatively well, the startup needs to be the furthest element of complacency. Major upcoming priorities are:
- Embedded finance that allows startups and platforms to integrate banking-as-a-service-based API.
- Use of AI-based risk instruments such as RiskShield to minimise fraud.
- Neobanking capabilities, virtual accounts and intelligent reconciliation.
- More significant world business facilitation- currency transfer, sending money home and affiliations.
- Strategic acquisitions in fintech are necessary to enhance the capabilities.
As India is forecasted to have increased its digital economy to an amount of over $1 trillion by the year 2030, Cashfree is setting itself up to appear as the invisible plumbing that is pumping everything.
Founder Insights: Lessons from the Frontline
Based on interviews, fireside chats, and public affirmations, there are a couple of recurring themes:
- Timing is more important than product. Akash emphasises that he is at the right place at the right time in 2015, when digital payments were going to take off.
- Consider depth as opposed to first-mover advantage. Success is not about being first… it is about going deep where it counts, said Akash as he gave due credit to Michael Seibel of YC.
- The product roadmap is customer-oriented. All the SecureID features of COD came up because of solving merchant pain points.
- Co-founders are complementary: Akash and operations, Reeju and brand and GTM 0x002F 12 to a level where it not only drives product but also emotional product.
The story behind Cashfree is technical acumen coupled with a laser focus on strategy–and both of them through founders who personify deconstructionist thought. An experiment to remove cash in delivery boxes, spurred by engineers who littered their offices with cash, started a team that would become a high-throughput infrastructure API-first company that supports thousands of entrepreneurs, platforms, and enterprises.
The desire of the company to continue on the path of embedding finance further, cross-border settlement, and AI-powered services, yet a single constant persists: the vision of Akash regarding technical excellence, and Reeju regarding inclusion and impact. Collectively, they are shaping the digital tracks along which the next trillion-dollar Indian economy will race.
