Vijay Shekhar Sharma

FOUNDER OF PAYTM

Vijay Shekhar Singh Sharma is an Indian entrepreneur and founder of mobile payments company, Paytm.

Early life

Sharma was born in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh. He cites Alibaba's founder Jack Ma and Masayoshi Son of Softbank as his inspirations.He started college at the age of 15. In 1997, while in college, started the website indiasite.net and sold it two years later for $1 million.

Career

In 2005, he started One97 Communications which offered mobile content like news, cricket scores, ringtones, jokes and exam results. One97 is the parent company of Paytm, which was launched in 2010.

In December 2015, Sharma criticised Facebook's Free Basics initiative in India, as being against the principle of net neutrality.

In 2017, Vijay Shekhar Sharma was featured in the World Billionaire's List by Forbes. He acquired the 1567th rank becoming India's youngest man to be featured on the list.

Awards

• Honoris Causa Doctorate of Sciences (D.Sc.) Degree, Amity University Gurgaon, 2016
• India Today magazine ranked him #18th in India's 50 Most powerful people of 2017 list.

Paytm is an Indian electronic payment and e-commerce brand based out of Delhi NCR, India. Launched in August 2010, it is the consumer brand of parent One97 Communications. The name is an acronym for "Pay Through Mobile." The company employs over 13,000 employees as of January 2017 and has 3 million offline merchants across India. It also operates the Paytm payment gateway and the Paytm Wallet.

Among other sources of funding, in 2015, Paytm became the first Indian company to receive funding from Chinese eCommerce company Alibaba, after it raised over $625 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion. The Alibaba Group was the biggest stakeholder in Paytm parent company One97 Communications.