Rajith Shaji is co-founder and chief executive of Volopay, the Singapore company that provides corporate cards, a multi-currency business account, and payables for businesses in Asia Pacific. He started it in 2019 with Rajesh Raikwar.
From a Village to Bangalore
Shaji grew up in a small village in India and studied computer science, then took a job at Tata Consultancy Services. With a friend he built websites in the evenings, and after they built a booking platform for a hotel that brought in customers, they both quit within the week and started a web agency in Bangalore. After a few years he wanted to work somewhere larger and took roles at fintech companies in Bangalore, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
A Website for a Product That Did Not Exist
On business trips he filed his expenses by hand at the end of every month, and without a corporate card it took days. He built a website describing a corporate card product, and when people started writing in, he showed it to a colleague, Rajesh Raikwar, and they began building Volopay. Visa rejections blocked their move to Singapore, so they joined the Antler program, which gave them visas and funded a $2.1 million seed round. They then went through Y Combinator, the first remote batch, working sessions that ran from 2 to 3 am because of the 15-hour time difference.
Volopay Today
Volopay started with employee cards and grew into global payouts, domestic payouts, accounting, and credit after Shaji and Raikwar spoke with hundreds of finance leaders. It has raised about $31 million and competes with Weel, Alaan, and Pleo. His lesson from the first company, that what matters is whether customers love what you build, still shapes how the team picks its next product.
