When Dushyant Sharma tried to patent his bill payment idea in 2004, he was turned down and told that a fax machine could solve the problem. He built Paymentus anyway. Utilities, insurers, and cities still mailed billions of paper bills, and people still paid many of them by check. Paymentus gave those billers one cloud platform to send bills and take payment by card, bank, app, or voice. Unusually for a 2021 IPO, it made money.

Born in Ontario

Sharma founded the company in Ontario, Canada, in 2004 as Bizpective Technologies, and renamed it Paymentus the next year. It first served mid-size billers to prove the system worked. In 2011 Accel-KKR invested and Paymentus moved up to larger clients. By 2020 it served more than 1,300 billers and processed more than 195 million transactions. PayPal and Walmart joined as the first partners in its payment network.

Profitable at the Bell

Paymentus priced at $21 a share, the top of its range, on May 25, 2021, and began trading on the NYSE under the ticker PAY. The stock rose about 36 percent on its first day. Paymentus came to market with $302 million in 2020 revenue and $13 million in profit. Accel-KKR and Sharma kept almost all of the votes. It is still public on the NYSE.

Cover: The rue Mosnier with Gas Lamp, Édouard Manet. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a gas lamp on a city street (the utility bill).