{
  "id": 1632202,
  "title": "Razorpay Launches AI Foundation Model Vulcan To Expedite Digital Payments",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/18/razorpay-launches-ai-foundation-model-vulcan-to-expedite-digital",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-08-18T04:00:29.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Inc42",
    "slug": "inc42",
    "url": "https://inc42.com/buzz/razorpay-launches-ai-foundation-model-vulcan-to-expedite-digital-payments/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Razorpay has introduced Vulcan, an AI foundation model designed to streamline digital payments. This transformer-based model, built with NVIDIA and AWS technology, aims to enhance payment reliability and security by detecting fraud across multiple merchants in real-time. Vulcan combines Razorpay's proprietary payments data with NVIDIA's accelerated computing and AWS' cloud infrastructure. The startup frames Vulcan as a system that learns from the entire payments ecosystem rather than solving narrow problems individually. Trained on approximately 3 trillion data points across 4 billion payments, Vulcan learns from around 3,000 signals per transaction, enabling it to understand complex financial movements at scale. Since its deployment, Vulcan has reportedly improved payment success rates by 8-10%, increased international card fraud detection by 8X, and identified 5X more fraudulent or disputed transactions without increasing the number of alerts. Additionally, it has made 40% more shoppers choose their preferred UPI app at checkout, contributing to an extra 1-2 lakh purchases monthly. CEO Harshil Mathur stated that every payment teaches the system something to enhance the next transaction, positioning Vulcan as the beginning of continuous improvements for Indian payments. Although Razorpay claims to be the first Indian player to launch such an offering, global competitor Stripe has also developed a payments foundation model trained on billions of transactions. The announcement aligns with Razorpay's broader AI strategy, which includes ChatGPT-native storefronts for merchants and an Agent Studio platform. Currently, Vulcan is in use by about 200 businesses. The launch coincides with Razorpay's preparations for a public offering on Indian stock exchanges, with an expected IPO size of $600-700 million and a potential valuation between $5-6 billion, slightly lower than its last private valuation of $7.5 billion. Founded in 2014 by Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, Razorpay provides a comprehensive payments and financial services platform, offering payment acceptance, disbursals, lending, and business banking solutions. The company has raised over $800 million in private equity since its inception from notable investors such as Y Combinator, Tiger Global Management, Ribbit Capital, and Lightspeed.",
  "summary": "Razorpay has launched a transformer-based AI foundation model Vulcan built to expedite digital payments. The IPO-bound startup claims that the…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}