Here is the story of a self-made billionaire- Vijay Shekhar Sharma

Behold the inspiring story of Paytm founder and CEO.

One 97 Communications IPO, also known as Paytm IPO has been the biggest IPO in India so far with an issue size of Rs 18,300 crore. The story of this biggest IPO was decorated by the founder and CEO of Paytm, Vijay Shekhar Sharma. His life story has been more fascinating and inspiring than the journey of Paytm itself.

What started at Rs 10,000 monthly salary, Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s net worth stood at Rs 165 billion as of December 8, 2021, according to Forbes real-time net worth tracker. He was born in a middle-class family where his father worked as a schoolteacher. While pursuing his engineering from Delhi College of Engineering, he started his website called indiasite.net which after two years he sold for about Rs 7.5 crore.

Later in 2000, he founded One97 Communications which is the parent company of Paytm. Back then the company used to sell mobile content through telecom operators. Paytm was launched in 2009. Later, as smartphones became popular, Paytm entered into mobile payments in 2014 and launched its licensed wallet product.

In the subsequent years, Paytm became a popular idea and attracted investments from big ventures such as Ant Financial, Alibaba and Softbank. However, the nation was not used to online transactions yet. The demonetization in 2016 happened to be a boon for the company. All of a sudden, digital transactions came into the limelight. Paytm was gifted with a user base of 40 crores and 2.5 crore daily transactions. The company became trending in the country in the digital payments segment. It made big news in 2018 when Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway invested Rs 2250 crore in Paytm.

In less than a decade, Paytm has now become a Rs 1 lakh crore company by market capitalization and the founder and CEO has made himself a billionaire.