Vijay Shekhar Sharma is an Indian entrepreneur and founder of Paytm. Sharma was born in Aligarh, UP in a modest family. Sharma cites Alibaba's founder Jack Ma and Masayoshi Son of Softbank as his inspirations.
In December 2015, Sharma criticised Facebook's Free Basics initiative in India, as being against the principle of net neutrality.
He faced difficulty in his studies at Delhi College of Engineering because he did not speak English. In 1997, while in college Sharma started the website indiasite.net and sold it two years later for $1 million.
In 2005, he started One97 Communications which offered mobile content like news, cricket scores, ringtones, jokes and exam results. One97 now is Paytm’s parent company. He started college at 15 and runs a billion dollar company at age 37 now.
Paytm is an Indian website headquartered in Noida, India. It was launched in 2010 and adds to the industry of FinTech in India. It is owned by One97 Communications. The firm started by offering mobile recharging, adding bill payment and e-commerce, with products similar to businesses such as Flipkart, Amazon.com, Snapdeal. In 2015, it further added booking bus travel. Paytm also launched movie ticket booking by partnering with Cinépolis in the year 2016.