🇮🇳 Vijay Shekhar Sharma

He was born in 1978 in Aligarh, a city in western Uttar Pradesh better known for its locks than its tech founders. His father Sulom Prakash Sharma was a Hindi-medium schoolteacher; the household ran on a teacher's salary and the conviction that the eldest son would be an engineer. He completed his schooling in Hindi, scored a top rank in the regional boards at fifteen, and won admission to the Delhi College of Engineering in 1994.

He arrived in Delhi with almost no English. He has described, in a much-quoted interview, sitting in his first-year electronics lectures and understanding perhaps one word in ten, then teaching himself the language by reading Time magazine with a Hindi-English dictionary at his elbow. He failed papers in his second year. He also, in the same period, built his first website — IndiaSite.net — and later sold it for a meaningful sum. He was barely out of his teens.

He founded One97 Communications in 2000 as a value-added-services company supplying ringtones, news alerts, and cricket scores to mobile-phone operators. The company was, for nearly a decade, an unglamorous business with steady cash flows and no obvious upside. Then in 2010, prompted by a trip to China where he watched Alipay transactions happen at street stalls, he pivoted aggressively. Paytm — short for 'Pay Through Mobile' — launched in August 2010 as a mobile-recharge platform and added wallet functionality in 2014.

The Alibaba investment of 2015, brokered by Jack Ma's group, gave Paytm both capital and a template. The company added merchant payments, bus tickets, movie tickets, gold, gas, electricity, education fees, and eventually a payments bank. By the time of the demonetisation announcement in November 2016, the infrastructure was in place. The Modi government's overnight withdrawal of most of India's currency was, for Paytm, a defining marketing event.

Sharma's personal life and his professional one have always blurred. He has said his second office is his car, his third the airport lounge, and his fourth the home in Delhi where his parents still cook the meals he eats most weekends. He bought, in the late 2010s, a Lutyens-Delhi bungalow that drew widespread attention; he has also said that purchase was the moment his mother stopped worrying about him.

The Paytm IPO of November 2021 was the largest in Indian history at issue. It was also, by the close of its first trading session, one of the most catastrophic listings on record — the stock dropped sharply on day one and continued falling. The retail investors who had subscribed on the strength of Sharma's salesmanship lost, in many cases, much of their money in the first year. He apologised publicly. He also, in interviews, refused to retreat: the business, he insisted, was profitable on operating metrics within two years of listing.

Then came January 2024 and the Reserve Bank of India's directive forcing Paytm Payments Bank to wind down most operations within weeks, citing persistent supervisory concerns. The stock collapsed again. Sharma, who had built the bank as his strategic moat, faced the most serious crisis of his career. He restructured aggressively, separating the bank from the broader fintech holding, signing partnerships with major Indian banks, and writing what amounted to a public mea culpa to retail customers.

He remains, in 2026, the chairman and chief executive of One97 Communications. He has also become one of Indian technology's most public personalities — voluble on Twitter, philosophical about failure, generous in mentorship of younger founders, and unapologetic about his own missteps. The first-generation small-town founder who taught himself English by reading Time magazine has, for better and worse, made digital payments in India inseparable from his name. The QR code on the kirana counter in any Indian street, by 2026, almost certainly still says Paytm — and that is the legacy that no IPO chart, rising or falling, can take from him.