In the fast-evolving landscape of Indian fintech, few names have garnered attention as quickly as Aviral Gupta — the Co-Founder & CEO of CotoPay, a platform redefining how businesses manage expenses through UPI-based digital vouchers. In just a few years, CotoPay has grown from a bold idea into a pioneering solution facilitating expense control for corporates, fleets, and enterprises — and at the center of that transformation is Aviral’s vision and leadership.
This in-depth article explores who Aviral Gupta is, his professional journey, contributions to CotoPay’s success, leadership style, strategic decisions, and the impact he has had on India’s digital payments ecosystem. From his early influences to his role in shaping UPI-based business payments, this comprehensive guide covers all aspects of his career and legacy in 2026.
Table of Contents
1. Early Life and Background
While detailed biographical information about Aviral Gupta’s early years (education and formative influences) outside professional contexts isn’t widely available in public business profiles, we can understand his professional identity through his work and public leadership roles:
A Visionary in Payments
Aviral Gupta is best known today as a payments expert with deep domain knowledge in India’s UPI ecosystem — the backbone of digital payments nationwide. His experience with both government and private sectors in payments has shaped his ability to capture and create solutions for unmet business needs.
Early in his career, Aviral worked at organizations such as BharatPe and the National Health Authority (NHA) — where he gained direct experience with large-scale payment platforms and government-industry financial systems. This foundation prepared him well for addressing mainstream business payments challenges using UPI.
2. Professional Journey Before CotoPay
Experience in Payments and Public Sector
Before founding CotoPay, Aviral’s work at the National Health Authority linked him to the development and implementation of UPI payment solutions used by government programs. His role likely involved working with large-scale digital payment infrastructure, compliance frameworks, and public-private payment integrations — giving him unique insight into how to build product systems on top of UPI.
At BharatPe, one of India’s well-known fintech startups focused on merchant payments, Aviral further deepened his understanding of UPI and the trajectory of India’s digital payment adoption. This blend of public sector and private fintech experience gave him a rare perspective in designing products that are both scalable and compliant with financial regulations.
3. Founding CotoPay: Vision Meets Opportunity
CotoPay: The Genesis
In 2025, Aviral Gupta co-founded CotoPay, officially launching India’s first e-RUPI voucher issuance stack for businesses — a platform that empowers companies to issue purpose-locked digital vouchers via UPI to manage business expenses such as meals, fuel, travel, and more. This model integrates with existing UPI infrastructure while providing the spend control that enterprises require.
In news coverage of the launch, industry observers highlighted that Aviral and his co-founders understood the payments problem deeply: personal UPI payments had reached massive scale, yet business expenses were still largely handled via cash, prepaid cards, or wallets — inefficient, hard to control, and difficult to reconcile. CotoPay aimed to solve that gap.
Strategic Positioning of CotoPay
Under Aviral’s leadership, CotoPay positioned itself as a bridge between traditional business spend management and wide consumer adoption of UPI, offering:
Purpose-locked UPI e-RUPI vouchers
Integration with major UPI apps (Google Pay, BHIM, etc.)
Merchant acceptance at millions of UPI QR codes
Automated visibility and reconciliation dashboards for enterprises
This approach eliminated the need for new apps or cards for employees — vouchers simply show up within familiar UPI apps linked to the user’s mobile number, creating a seamless experience for both the issuer (the company) and the redeemer (employees/contractors).
4. Aviral Gupta’s Leadership Style (Impact and Traits)
Analyzing the success of CotoPay under Aviral’s leadership reveals several defining traits:
4.1 Customer-Centric Product Vision
Aviral’s emphasis on user convenience — such as requiring no new apps and leveraging the existing UPI ecosystem — helped avoid common adoption roadblocks. By focusing first on fixing real business pain points rather than reinventing user behavior, CotoPay gained early traction among corporates.
4.2 Technical Understanding with Strategic Business Focus
Unlike leaders who come solely from either a technical or business background, Aviral demonstrated an ability to marry product architecture with market needs — crucial for a fintech platform that must satisfy both compliance and UX (user experience).
4.3 Collaboration with Payment Infrastructure Players
CotoPay’s work with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and partner banks ensured compliance with RBI and NPCI guidelines, strengthening trust among enterprise clients. Aviral’s ability to work across regulators, banks, and product development teams was central to CotoPay’s initial rollout.
4.4 Balancing Innovation with Regulation
Operating in fintech requires navigating complex regulatory environments. Under Aviral’s leadership, CotoPay remained aligned with evolving UPI and e-RUPI standards, helping position it as a compliant solution rather than a disruptive threat to financial systems.
5. Milestones and Achievements at CotoPay
5.1 Platform Launch and Adoption
CotoPay’s official launch in 2025 marked the first time a private-sector startup offered e-RUPI vouchers for business expense management across industry segments, including fleet management and enterprise reimbursements — a major milestone for India’s digital payments ecosystem.
5.2 Scaling with Large UPI Merchant Network
One of CotoPay’s strategic successes was leveraging the 6.5 crore+ merchant acceptance network of UPI across India, offering employees and spenders unparalleled access to use their business vouchers anywhere UPI is accepted without special onboarding or merchant integrations.
5.3 Rapid Enterprise Integration
By promoting plug-and-play APIs and dashboards, CotoPay enabled enterprises to integrate expense management quickly with minimal disruption, significantly reducing friction in adoption.
6. CotoPay’s Business Model & Market Strategy
6.1 Revenue Streams
CotoPay’s monetization strategy under Aviral’s leadership includes:
Enterprise subscription or transaction-based fees
Value-added services via analytics and spend insights
Potential licensing or partnership revenue with banks and payment processors
6.2 Target Markets
CotoPay’s core markets include:
Large and mid-sized enterprises with high expense volumes
Logistics and fleet businesses needing fuel and operational spend control
HR and operations teams aiming to simplify reimbursements
6.3 Scaling Beyond India
Leveraging UPI and NPCI frameworks — which are considered among the most advanced payment rails globally — positions CotoPay for strategic expansion or replication in markets with similar digital ecosystems and high mobile payment adoption.
7. Leadership Philosophy: Vision, Values, & Culture
While Aviral Gupta’s public profiles in business articles focus primarily on product and strategy, the success of CotoPay also points to a broader leadership philosophy:
7.1 People-First Approach
CotoPay’s user experience — requiring no new app and being immediately familiar — reflects a people-first design ethos that values simplicity and accessibility.
7.2 Empowering Teams
Reports about CotoPay’s founding team describe a collaborative structure with co-founders and a leadership team bringing expertise from payments, marketing, and technology — indicating an emphasis on cross-functional leadership and shared growth.
7.3 Continuous Innovation
Aviral’s strategic role at CotoPay involves steering the company through an evolving fintech landscape while anticipating client needs and regulatory directions — demonstrating a belief in continuous product evolution rather than static solutions.
8. Challenges and Strategic Responses
Leading a fintech startup in a complex payments environment comes with unique challenges:
8.1 Regulatory Complexity
UPI and e-RUPI are governed by RBI and NPCI regulations. Maintaining compliance while innovating requires careful balance — one that Aviral and his team managed by working alongside regulatory partners.
8.2 Market Education
Educating enterprises to shift from cash or card-based expense systems to digital vouchers requires outreach and demonstrable ROI — which CotoPay has supported through case studies and pilot deployments.
8.3 Competitive Landscape
Traditional corporate expense tools (cards, wallets, expense apps) remain widespread. By focusing on UPI — India’s dominant payment method — CotoPay distinguished itself with a simpler, more integrated solution.
9. Impact on India’s Payments Ecosystem
9.1 Standardizing Business Payments
CotoPay’s adoption of e-RUPI vouchers for business expenses represents a potential shift toward programmable business payments — making expense management more transparent and measurable.
9.2 Broader UPI Use Cases
By pushing UPI beyond personal payments into business spending and control, Aviral’s work has helped expand UPI’s position as a versatile payments rail across use cases — potentially influencing future fintech products.
9.3 Empowering Finance & Operations Teams
Finance teams that integrate CotoPay report faster reconciliation, fewer errors, and better control — illustrating how digital payments can reduce administrative overhead and improve financial governance.
10. Recognition, Awards & Industry Standing
While specific public awards for Aviral Gupta are not yet broadly reported, CotoPay’s recognition as India’s first e-RUPI voucher issuance platform for businesses places Aviral among innovators shaping India’s fintech future. The company’s press coverage highlights his leadership as a key factor in this distinction.
11. Future Outlook & Legacy
Looking ahead, Aviral Gupta’s role is likely to continue evolving as CotoPay scales further into 2026 and beyond. Potential directions include:
Expansion into new markets with similar payment rails
Strategic partnerships with global digital payments platforms
Continued focus on programmable payments for business and enterprise solutions
His legacy so far includes pushing the boundaries of how UPI can be used in business contexts, making digitally native payments smarter, controlled, and enterprise-ready.
Conclusion
Aviral Gupta’s journey — from experience in payments platforms and government collaborations to co-founding and leading CotoPay — underscores the transformation underway in India’s fintech ecosystem. By connecting innovation with practicality, he has helped pave the way for businesses to adopt digital UPI payment solutions with precision, control, and scalability.
Through strategic leadership, product vision, and a deep understanding of financial ecosystems, Aviral Gupta stands out as a key figure in India’s fintech growth, inspiring new generations of entrepreneurs and payment innovators.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. Who is Aviral Gupta?
Aviral Gupta is the Co-Founder & CEO of CotoPay, a fintech platform that issues purpose-locked e-RUPI voucher solutions for digital business expense management on UPI.
2. What experience did Aviral Gupta have before CotoPay?
Before founding CotoPay, Aviral worked in payments and fintech environments, including roles at BharatPe and with the National Health Authority, where he gained expertise in large-scale digital payment infrastructure.
3. What is CotoPay’s core product?
CotoPay allows businesses to issue prepaid, purpose-locked UPI e-RUPI vouchers that employees can redeem with their existing UPI apps, providing control and visibility over business spends.
4. How has Aviral’s leadership shaped CotoPay’s success?
Under his leadership, CotoPay emphasized user convenience, regulatory compliance, and leveraging existing payment infrastructure, accelerating adoption and solving real business expense problems.
5. What impact has CotoPay had on business payments in India?
CotoPay expanded the use of UPI beyond personal payments to business expenses, helping finance teams reduce reconciliation overhead, control costs, and simplify spend management through digital vouchers.
6. What are the future prospects for Aviral Gupta and CotoPay?
Future directions may include global expansion, deeper enterprise integration, and leveraging programmable business payments across multiple sectors beyond India.
