By FMTeam Vijay Shekhar Sharma is an Indian entrepreneur and a multimillionaire business magnate. He is the founder chairman of One97 Communications, founded in the year 1997, and he also founded the consumer brand Paytm in the year 2010. He is the son of a school teacher from a small city in North India. His brand Paytm has notched up to 400 million users and accomplishes about 25 million transactions every day.
| Feature | Details |
| Name | Vijay Shekhar Sharma |
| Occupation | Founder of Paytm |
| Known For | Finding Paytm, a leading digital payments and financial services company in India. |
| Net Worth | $2.4 billion [Estimated] |
| Age | 46 years |
| Education | B.Tech from Delhi College of Engineering |
| Other Ventures | He is the founder and director of One 97 Communications, the parent company of Paytm. |
| Notable Achievements | Best Serial Entrepreneur award, Entrepreneur of the Year award by AIMA. |
Education and Family:
Vijay Shekhar Sharma was born on 7th June 1978 in Uttar Pradesh. He was born to a schoolteacher and displayed a strong passion for technology from a very young age. He excelled in his studies right from a very young age, and he graduated with a B.Tech degree from Delhi College of Engineering. Though he is at the height of his success, he has a strong connection with his family and holds very strong family values. He is also involved in a number of philanthropic activities and has made significant contributions to various social causes.
Career Highlights:
His entrepreneurial journey started in the year 1997, when he founded indiasite.net when he was still in college. He sold his website for US $1 million two years later. He established One97 Communications, a company that offered mobile content such as cricket scores, ringtones, jokes, and exam results. In the year 2010, Sharma launched Paytm, a digital payments and financial services company under One97 Communications. His success propelled Sharma to prominence in the Fintech industry.
In 2010, when he launched Paytm as a platform for mobile recharge, it evolved quickly into a comprehensive digital wallet and payment platform. It came to offer a number of services such as ticket booking and utility bill payments and also opened avenues for online shopping. Paytm was growing rapidly right from its inception, and it attained remarkable growth as the government of India announced its demonetization drive in the year 2016. The shortage of cash that this drive created pushed millions of users to adopt different digital payments. Over the eyars, Paytm attracted a great deal of investment from global leaders such as Ant Financial, Softbank, Berkshire Hathaway, etc. All these investments pooled to help Paytm reach a valuation of about $16 billion at its peak. It was Sharma’s leadership ideologies and visions that have been pivotal in navigating the Paytm platform through its different phases of challenges and growth.
Awards:
He has received the Best Serial Entrepreneur award at the Rural and Urban Development Summit and Awards 2022. He also won the Entrepreneur of the Year award from AIMA in the year 2018 and was named one of the top 100 influential persons in 2017 by Time Magazine. He was also appointed as the UN Environment’s Patron for clean air for the awareness he created through the Breathe Life Campaign.
Overall, with the advent of Paytm, Vijay Shekar Sharma had a significant impact on the Indian economy and also the digital payments landscape. His efforts have helped with convenient financial solutions for millions of Indians, and they have also significantly contributed to the growth of the economy. His story has been a profound inspiration for many aspiring entrepreneurs, and he is truly a model of innovation, persistence, and a visionary in achieving success.