Razorpay Partners with Replit for Indian Developer Payments

- Replit founder Amjad Masad began coding in internet cafes in Amman, Jordan, before working as a software engineer at Facebook and as a founding engineer at Codecademy. He co-founded Replit in 2016 with a mission to make coding more accessible. - Razorpay was founded in 2014 by IIT Roorkee graduates Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar. Before starting the company, Kumar was a software development engineer at Microsoft, and Mathur was a wireline field engineer at Schlumberger. - The partnership allows Replit to monetize its Indian user base without establishing a local entity, as Razorpay will handle compliance, foreign exchange, and USD settlements. For Indian developers, this enables payment in rupees via local methods like UPI for Replit's services. - India is Replit's second-largest and fastest-growing developer community, with over 2 million users. To better serve them, Replit has established its first international server cluster in Mumbai to reduce latency. - This collaboration is part of Razorpay's broader strategy of embedding payments into AI-led software creation, which includes recent work with OpenAI. - For Replit, which has over 30 million users globally and a valuation of $1.2 billion, integrating local payment methods is key to converting more users to paid plans in a large market. - Razorpay recently received a Payment Aggregator - Cross Border license from the Reserve Bank of India, which allows it to facilitate international transactions for both Indian and global businesses. This enables Indian businesses to accept payments in over 130 currencies. - The integration will allow developers on Replit to directly build monetization features like UPI and card payments into their AI-built applications from the start.