Stripe, PayPal Ventures bet on India’s Xflow to fix cross-border B2B payments

Xflow, an Indian fintech startup, has secured backing from some Stripe and PayPal Ventures successful a $16.6 cardinal backing round. The concern comes arsenic the institution works to carve retired a presumption successful cross-border B2B payments, a marketplace inactive dominated by banks and manual processes.

The Series A circular was led by General Catalyst, with information from existing investors Square Peg, Stripe, Lightspeed, and Moore Capital, portion PayPal Ventures joined arsenic a caller backer. The all-equity circular values the Bengaluru-based startup astatine $85 cardinal post-investment and brings its full backing to much than $32 cardinal to date.

Despite rapid digitization successful home payments, cross-border B2B transfers for Indian exporters remain heavy reliant connected banks, often with constricted visibility into fees, colony timelines, and the last magnitude received successful rupees. The friction is peculiarly acute for larger exporters moving millions of dollars into India to money salaries and section operations, creating an opening for fintech infrastructure players specified arsenic Xflow that committedness greater transparency and velocity successful planetary wealth movement.

Founded successful 2021, Xflow provides cross-border outgo infrastructure for businesses ranging from exporters and SaaS firms to platforms and freelancers, enabling them to cod planetary payments, negociate overseas exchange, and settee funds successful India.

“Cross-border B2B payments were stuck successful a antithetic property compared to UPI,” co-founder Anand Balaji (pictured above, center) said successful an interview, referring to India’s wide utilized instant home payments network, the Unified Payments Interface.

Balaji, who antecedently helped physique retired Stripe’s India business, founded Xflow with erstwhile Stripe colleagues Ashwin Bhatnagar (pictured above, right) and Abhijit Chandrasekaran (pictured above, left).

Last year, Xflow said it enabled Indian businesses to cod payments from much than 100 countries successful implicit 25 currencies. It processed adjacent to $1 cardinal successful annualized cross-border outgo measurement past year, marking astir 10-fold maturation from the aforesaid play successful 2024, Balaji told TechCrunch.

According to the company, its lawsuit basal has expanded to astir 15,000 businesses spanning SaaS firms, planetary capableness centers (which are offshore units that multinationals run successful India), IT services exporters, freelancers, and fintech platforms.

Transaction sizes alteration wide by segment, with planetary capableness centers averaging astir $1 cardinal to $2 cardinal per transaction, goods exporters astir $30,000 to $40,000, and freelancers astir $3,000, according to Balaji.

Xflow is positioning itself arsenic a payments infrastructure supplier alternatively than a nonstop payments application, offering APIs that let platforms and exporters to embed cross-border wealth question into their ain products.

“We didn’t privation to physique the adjacent Wise — we privation to powerfulness the adjacent 1000 Wises,” Balaji said.

The startup has besides introduced an AI-based overseas speech instrumentality to assistance concern teams optimize the timing of currency conversions. Xflow says the diagnostic has generated incremental gains for immoderate customers done data-driven overseas speech decisions.

The instrumentality allows businesses to acceptable people conversion rates alternatively than accepting prevailing slope quotes. Balaji likened the diagnostic to bounds orders successful trading — instructions to bargain oregon merchantability lone astatine a specified price.

“What we’ve added is the prediction furniture and the quality to really acceptable a bounds order,” helium said. The exemplary presently provides a three-day forecast with astir 92% confidence, Balaji said, though TechCrunch could not independently verify that figure.

Xflow faces contention from banks that inactive predominate ample cross-border B2B transfers, arsenic good arsenic fintech players specified arsenic Wise, Payoneer, and Skydo astatine the little extremity of the market. But Balaji said the startup’s absorption connected high-value transactions and API-led infrastructure differentiates it from galore rivals.

The startup plans to deploy the caller superior toward gathering further products connected apical of its halfway payments infrastructure and securing regulatory licenses successful caller markets, Balaji said. Xflow is preparing to rotation retired import capabilities successful the coming months and is seeking licenses successful Canada and Singapore, adjacent arsenic it remains focused connected India arsenic its superior market.

Xflow has besides received in-principle support from the Reserve Bank of India for a Payment Aggregator–Cross Border (PA-CB) licence covering some exports and imports. The startup besides has level partnerships with Easebuzz and Drip Capital to embed its cross-border capabilities into their offerings.

Backing from Stripe and PayPal Ventures, Balaji said, has helped fortify the startup’s credibility with banking and regulatory partners, adjacent arsenic it continues to enactment with aggregate outgo providers commercially.

The startup presently has astir 65 employees arsenic it scales its cross-border infrastructure business.