Xflow Raises $16.6M for India Payments
Bangalore-based Xflow Payments has closed a $16.6M Series A to expand its cross-border payments platform. The company found its wedge by building an API-first solution to simplify complex FX and compliance workflows for India's growing cohort of tech and SaaS exporters.
The funding round was led by General Catalyst, with notable participation from existing investors Stripe and Lightspeed, and new investor PayPal Ventures. This makes Xflow the first Indian fintech to be backed by both Stripe and PayPal, a significant vote of confidence from two of the world's largest payments platforms. The all-equity Series A brings Xflow's total funding to over $32 million and gives the company a post-money valuation of $85 million. Xflow was founded in 2021 by former Stripe colleagues Anand Balaji, Ashwin Bhatnagar, and Abhijit Chandrasekaran. Their insider experience revealed that for Indian businesses, cross-border B2B payments were "stuck in a different age compared to UPI," plagued by slow bank wires, opaque fees, and cash flow uncertainty. This friction for exporters and SaaS companies created the opening for an infrastructure-first approach. Instead of a consumer-facing app, Xflow provides APIs that let platforms and exporters embed international payment capabilities directly into their own products. This strategy targets the developer experience, abstracting away the complexities of currency conversion, compliance, and multi-day settlement delays. The company serves as a crucial infrastructure provider for other fintechs like Drip Capital and Easebuzz. A key differentiator is Xflow's AI-driven foreign exchange tool for finance teams. The feature allows businesses to set target conversion rates, similar to a limit order in financial markets, rather than accepting whatever rate a bank offers. Xflow claims this tool has helped clients earn an additional 8-10 paise per dollar on their transactions. The new capital coincides with Xflow securing final approval from the Reserve Bank of India for a Payment Aggregator–Cross Border (PA-CB) license covering both exports and imports. This dual authorization is a significant regulatory moat, strengthening its market position and expanding its operational scope beyond just export collections. The company has seen significant traction, experiencing tenfold growth in 2025 and processing nearly $1 billion in annualized cross-border payment volume. It now serves nearly 15,000 businesses, including SaaS companies, global capability centers, and IT service exporters, enabling them to receive payments from over 100 countries in more than 25 currencies.
