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Vijay Shekhar Sharma

Founder & CEO, Paytm

BTech, Delhi College of Engineering (now Delhi Technological University)

Photo: Richter Frank-Jurgen, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

About

Vijay Shekhar Sharma is the founder of Paytm and the chairman, managing director and chief executive of its parent, One97 Communications. Born in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, in 1978, the son of a schoolteacher, he went to school in nearby Harduaganj, entered college at 15 and graduated with a BTech from the Delhi College of Engineering, now Delhi Technological University, at 19. While still a student in 1997 he built the website indiasite.net, which he sold two years later for about $1 million. In 2000 he founded One97 Communications to sell mobile content such as news, cricket scores, ringtones and exam results, and in 2010 he launched Paytm, which grew into a digital payments and financial services business. Paytm went public in November 2021, raising $2.5 billion at a $19 billion valuation, India's largest IPO at that time. In 2024 he stepped down as part-time non-executive chairman and board member of Paytm Payments Bank after the bank ran into regulatory action by the Reserve Bank of India.

Sharma is also an active angel investor and has backed around 80 startups, including Innov8, GOQii, HackerEarth, NoBroker, Treebo and TrulyMadly. In January 2022 the ICANN-supported Universal Acceptance Steering Group named him its ambassador in India, and UN Environment has named him a Patron for Clean Air. His honours include Time's list of the 100 most influential people (2017), the Economic Times Entrepreneur of the Year (2016) and the Uttar Pradesh government's Yash Bharati award (2016). He has also served a three-year term on the board of management of Netaji Subhas University of Technology in Delhi.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

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