Aviral Gupta, Vidit Sidana, and Syed Uzair Ahmed co-founded CotoPay in 2025, India's first e-RUPI voucher issuance platform for businesses. Built by the architects of CoWIN and e-RUPI, the platform turns UPI into a controlled, purpose-locked corporate expense tool. On Shark Tank India Season 5, they secured ₹75 lakh from Anupam Mittal and Kunal Bahl.
The Origin — From CoWIN to CotoPay: A Government Project That Sparked a Private Revolution
• The founding story of CotoPay begins inside the National Health Authority of India during the pandemic years.
• Aviral Gupta studied at The Doon School and earned a Master's in Management from London Business School before joining BharatPe's founding team, where he learnt how UPI works from the inside. During COVID-19, he joined the National Health Authority, where he worked alongside Syed Uzair Ahmed, the third co-founder who had spent 20 years in software development, including core work on Aadhaar and the architecture of the CoWIN vaccination platform.
• “Our existing team was a part of the initial team at National Health Authority, Government of India, that had helped develop e-RUPI with NPCI. The solutions NHA helped develop with e-RUPI are now being used by various national and state government departments for welfare and subsidy disbursements. Since these vouchers can be locked for a specific purpose, it helped in ensuring that the spend is happening for the intended benefit only," says Aviral Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO of CotoPay.
• The third co-founder, Vidit Sidana, graduated from SRCC Delhi University and IIM Ahmedabad before spending seven years in the consumer sector, most recently as Brand Manager at ITC handling Sunfeast biscuits, a ₹7,000 crore portfolio. He brought the commercial and marketing discipline that turned a technically brilliant idea into a market-ready business.
• After one and a half years of development, CotoPay launched in October 2025, as a brand of Cotodel Technologies Private Limited.
The Strategic Genius — Lock the Purpose, Trust the UPI
• The boldest decision CotoPay made was also its simplest: instead of building a new payment app, build on top of the one India already trusts.
• CotoPay issues e-RUPI vouchers to employees' mobile numbers, which appear directly in their existing UPI apps, such as Google Pay, BHIM, and PhonePe, within the e-RUPI section. Employees scan any merchant's existing UPI QR code and select the voucher as the payment method. The voucher only activates at merchants whose category code matches the voucher's purpose: a fuel voucher works at petrol stations, a meal voucher works at food establishments.
• This means a company can issue travel allowances, fuel budgets, meal reimbursements, or petty cash allocations with category-level controls, and money stays in the company's bank account until the transaction is completed. No new app. No physical card. No KYC per employee. No leakage.
• "All of us Indians trust UPI for all of our day-to-day personal spends but are still stuck with cash, prepaid cards or wallets for our business spends. With CotoPay, now corporates and fleets have the option to lock expenses at a category level, while still giving the flexibility and convenience to the users to pay using their existing UPI apps," says Vidit Sidana, Co-Founder and CBO.
• The fleet management use case is particularly compelling. Drivers receive fuel vouchers that activate only at petrol stations. Money stays with the company. Misuse across other categories is structurally impossible. And the 6.5 crore-plus UPI merchants across India are already set up to accept these payments.
The Shark Tank Moment — A Pitch, A Skit, and Two Sharks Who Said Yes
• CotoPay appeared on Shark Tank India Season 5, entering the tank with a founding team of three. The pitch opened with a relatable skit: an employee fumbling with torn receipts, washed bills, and a non-functional expense card. The audience laughed. The Sharks recognised it instantly.
• CotoPay sought ₹50 lakh for 1% equity at a ₹50 crore valuation. Anupam Mittal and Kunal Bahl counter-offered ₹75 lakh for 2% equity plus 1% advisory equity. The founders accepted, securing not just capital but two of India's most commercially sharp startup investors on the cap table.
• The Shark Tank investment was confirmed on February 11, 2026, the same day Tracxn recorded CotoPay's first funding round of $82.8K.
Scale and The Road Ahead
• CotoPay is headquartered in Delhi and founded in 2025, with 105 active competitors in the global expense management space. The platform is currently being expanded for fleet management, corporate expense management, and any business with full-time or part-time workers who need controlled, traceable digital spend.
• The revenue model is transaction-volume based rather than per-user, removing the friction for businesses to onboard every employee. For a company processing ₹10 lakh in monthly expenses, CotoPay charges between ₹50,000 and ₹70,000, a pricing structure designed to reward scale rather than penalise adoption.
• With 20 billion-plus transactions happening on UPI monthly in India as of August 2025, the infrastructure that CotoPay is building on is the most robust, most trusted, and most deeply embedded payment network the country has ever built.
The Business Lesson — The Best Infrastructure Innovation Uses What People Already Trust
• The sharpest lesson from CotoPay's journey is this: the most powerful product innovations are built on top of existing behaviours, not in opposition to them.
• Employees already use UPI. Merchants already accept UPI. The infrastructure already exists across 6.5 crore merchant locations. CotoPay simply added the one layer that business expense management needed: purpose-locking, category-control, and automated reconciliation — all within the ecosystem that a billion Indians already trust with their daily financial lives.
• The government built e-RUPI to ensure welfare money reached its intended recipients without leakage. Aviral, Vidit, and Uzair took that same logic and applied it to the private sector: ensure business money reaches its intended purpose without leakage. Same technology. New market. Enormous scale.
• They built CoWIN for a nation. Now they are building CotoPay for every business in it.
Sources: Business Standard, StartupArticle, Tracxn, CotoPay Official Website, StartupStag, TheInspireSpy
Show more
