Vijay Shekhar Sharma was born on June 7, 1978, in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, to Sulom Prakash, a schoolteacher, and Asha Sharma, a housewife. He is a graduate of Delhi College of Engineering with a Bachelor of Engineering degree (now Delhi Technological University). In Harduaganj, a tiny town near Aligarh, he attended a Hindi medium school.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, an Indian businessman who was born in 1978, is a multibillionaire. Paytm, a financial technology startup, is his brainchild and he is the CEO. With a net worth of $1.3 billion, Forbes classified him as India’s youngest billionaire in 2017. He was named to Time Magazine’s 2017 list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful People. He was given the Yash Bharati award, Uttar Pradesh’s highest civilian accolade. According to Forbes, in 2020, he was India’s #62 richest person, with a net worth of US$2.35 billion.
“I learned myself English by memorising rock songs and reading translated textbooks in English and Hindi at the same time,” he claimed in an interview with Bloomberg News. He founded the website indiasite.net in 1997 while still in college and then successfully sold it for $1 million two years later.
In the year 2000, he founded One97 Communications, which provided news, cricket scores, ringtones, jokes, and exam results via mobile devices. Paytm was founded by Sharma in 2010. One97 is the parent company of Paytm. Paytm has a user base of over 400 million regular users who transact over 25 million times per day. Sharma was able to secure $300 million in funding from Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway in 2018.
Sharma has been selected as the UN Environment’s ‘Patron for Clean Air,’ where he assists in driving environmental action and awareness, as well as advocating for the UN Environment’s global Breathe Life campaign’s aims.
