Vijay Shekhar Sharma is an entrepreneur and founder of Paytm. Paytm is an Indian electronic payment and e-commerce company. The name is an acronym for "Pay Through Mobile." The company employs over 13,000 employees as of January 2017 and has 3 million offline merchants across India.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma comes from a lower middle class family. His father was a school teacher and his mother a home-maker. He has two elder sisters and a younger brother.

In 1997, while in college, He had started the website indiasite.net and sold it two years later for $1 million.

In 2005, Vijay Shekhar Sharma started One97 Communications which offered mobile content like news, cricket scores, ringtones, jokes and exam results. One97 is the parent company of Paytm, which was launched in 2010

While attempting to set up One97, Vijay once ended up with a loan of Rs. 8 lakhs. A tremendous sum for a middle class man back in the days, he had taken the principal amount at 24% interest, which got him into an endless loop of unpayable sum.

Vijay Sharma got the inspiration to build Paytm during a visit to China, when he saw vegetable vendors using their mobile phones to receive payments from some customers. This led to him establishing Paytm wallet in 2013.

In 2015, Chinese businessman Jack Ma, owner of Alibaba Group, bought a $500 million stake in Paytm. Ma is estimated to hold 30 to 40 percent of Paytm. Alibaba now reportedly provides assistance to Paytmin order to improve fraud detection and fulfillment systems, among other things.

In 2017, Vijay Shekhar Sharma was featured in the World Billionaire's List by Forbes. He acquired the 1567th rank becoming India's youngest man to be featured on the list.

India Today magazine ranked him #18th in India's 50 Most powerful people of 2017 list.
