Razorpay has promoted Apuarv Sethi to Chief Marketing Officer, a move that consolidates marketing and SME growth strategy under a single leader at a moment when the fintech firm is accelerating its expansion across India and Southeast Asia. Sethi, who joined the company in 2021 as Vice President of Marketing and has since risen to Senior Vice President, now steps into the CMO role with a mandate that extends well beyond conventional brand management.
The appointment is as much a signal about Razorpay’s strategic direction as it is a recognition of Sethi’s contributions. In his new capacity, he will oversee go-to-market initiatives, ecosystem development, revenue acceleration, and growth frameworks across regions and product categories. Crucially, the role carries an explicit focus on AI-powered customer engagement and predictive marketing models, areas that Razorpay’s leadership views as central to how the company builds and sustains brand trust at scale.
Sethi’s track record at Razorpay offers a glimpse into the kind of marketing leader he has been. He led campaigns including ‘Backing India’s Boldest’, which positioned the company as a growth partner to Indian entrepreneurs, and ‘#ImaginedThroughAI’, which demonstrated the company’s willingness to experiment with emerging technologies as a creative medium rather than merely as an operational tool. A third campaign, ‘Get Paid, Not Played’, leaned into the pain points of small business owners, speaking directly to the audience that remains central to Razorpay’s growth story. Together, these efforts helped expand the company’s brand and ecosystem marketing capabilities at a time of intense competition in the Indian fintech space.
Before Razorpay, Sethi built his career across a range of high-stakes environments. He held leadership roles at Flipkart, where marketing operates at the intersection of consumer behaviour and logistics at scale, at Mindtree, in the technology services space, and at Manipal Global Education Services, where he worked with a brand navigating complex reputational and institutional dynamics. That variety of contexts has given him a breadth of perspective that Razorpay is now positioning at the centre of its global ambitions.
Rahul Kothari, Chief Operating Officer at Razorpay, described Sethi as someone whose understanding of customer behaviour is matched by a strategic and creative vision that has helped build a brand resonating with small businesses and entrepreneurs. Kothari also noted that as Razorpay pushes toward global expansion, strong brand leadership becomes more critical than ever, pointing to Sethi’s ability to blend storytelling with business impact as a key qualification for the role.
Sethi himself articulated a philosophy that frames AI not as a replacement for human creativity but as its amplifier. He described the future of marketing as being built at the intersection of machine intelligence and human empathy, and positioned Razorpay’s opportunity in an AI-native world as one of reimagining how brands connect with customers, build trust, and create value at scale, while keeping creativity and humanity at the core.
For Razorpay, the CMO elevation is part of a larger posture. As the company deepens its footprint in Southeast Asia alongside its home market, the coherence of its brand across geographies, products, and customer segments becomes a harder and more consequential problem to solve. Sethi’s promotion signals that Razorpay intends to meet that challenge with senior, dedicated marketing leadership at the table.
In a fintech landscape where product differentiation is increasingly difficult to sustain, how a company markets itself, and to whom, and with what sense of purpose, may prove to be as strategically consequential as the technology it builds. Razorpay appears to be making that bet.
