Vijay Shekhar Sharma is Founder and CEO of One97 Communications and its consumer brand Paytm, revolutionizing the digital payments and financial services sector in India.

He graduated with a B.Tech degree from Delhi College of Engineering at 19 years old and in 1997, while in college, started the website indiasite.net, which he sold two years later for US$1 million. In 2000, he started One97 Communications which offered mobile content including news, cricket scores, ringtones, jokes and exam results.

He was named among Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in 2017 and received Entrepreneur of the Year award by AIMA in 2018. In January 2022, he was appointed as Universal Acceptance Ambassador in India by the ICANN-supported Universal Acceptance Steering Group.

In November 2021, Paytm went public raising $2.5 billion at a valuation of $19 billion, making it India's largest initial public offering at that time. He secured a $300 million investment from Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway in August 2018.

Paytm has grown significantly since India's 2016 demonetization, reaching 400 million users and 25 million transactions daily. By the September 2025 quarter, Paytm achieved its first net profit of Rs 21 crore on revenue of Rs 2,061 crore, serving over 7.5 crore monthly users and over 1.3 crore merchants.