Razorpay hires AI veterans from Microsoft, Salesforce, CRED to build agentic commerce stack

Fintech unicorn Razorpay has strengthened its artificial intelligence leadership by hiring senior engineering executives from Microsoft, Salesforce, CRED and AI startup Divyam.ai as it accelerates its transition towards AI-native financial infrastructure designed for the emerging era of agentic commerce.

The company on Tuesday said Sudhir Reddy, former chief technology officer and co-founder of Divyam.ai, has joined as the senior-most individual contributor to lead AI and data architecture. He is joined by Abhishek Agarwal, formerly Principal Group Engineering Manager at Microsoft, Bhavya Shivaprakash, former Senior Director at Salesforce, and Anuj Mathur, former Senior Director at CRED.

The appointments come as Razorpay prepares for a future in which AI agents, rather than humans alone, initiate purchases, negotiate transactions and execute payments autonomously.

"The next decade of financial infrastructure will be built very differently from the last," said Shashank Kumar, co-founder and CTO of Razorpay. "Software won't just help businesses operate—it will increasingly reason, decide and act on their behalf."

The latest hires expand an AI-focused engineering build-out that began last year with the appointment of Praburam Rambadran as Senior Vice President of Engineering. Since then, Razorpay has introduced products including Agentic Payments, Agent Studio, Agentic Dashboard, Connected Banking Agents and a suite of internal AI-native developer tools aimed at embedding artificial intelligence across its financial services platform.

The company said the expanded engineering team will focus on AI capabilities spanning payments, banking, fraud prevention, risk management, developer platforms and data infrastructure, with the objective of making financial systems increasingly autonomous, scalable and resilient.

Rambadran said deploying AI at financial scale requires far more than large language models, calling data quality, system reliability and operational judgement critical to production-grade AI systems. The new leadership team was selected for experience building AI platforms in large-scale, high-stakes environments, he said.

The move reflects a broader shift across India's fintech sector as companies move beyond deploying AI assistants toward building infrastructure capable of supporting autonomous financial decision-making. Rather than treating AI as a standalone capability, fintech firms are increasingly embedding it into payments, banking, fraud detection and merchant operations to automate complex workflows and improve operational efficiency. Razorpay's latest leadership hires signal that the next phase of competition may increasingly depend on engineering organisations purpose-built for AI-native financial services rather than conventional software development.