Stripe and PayPal Ventures Back Indian Payments Startup Xflow
B2B cross-border payments startup Xflow has secured investment from Stripe and PayPal Ventures. The Indian company aims to modernize and simplify enterprise remittance and payment flows. The backing reflects a growing demand for robust, API-first financial infrastructure to support global business operations.
- The $16.6 million funding round was a Series A led by General Catalyst, which valued the Bengaluru-based startup at $85 million post-money and brought its total funding to over $32 million. - Xflow was founded in 2021 by former Stripe colleagues Anand Balaji, Ashwin Bhatnagar, and Abhijit Chandrasekaran to address the complexities of B2B international payments, which lag behind India's highly developed domestic UPI system. - The company has received final authorization from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for a Payment Aggregator–Cross Border (PA-CB) license covering both exports and imports, a key regulatory step for operating at scale. - Xflow's platform processed nearly $1 billion in annualized payment volume in the last year, reflecting a tenfold increase, and served approximately 15,000 businesses with collections from over 100 countries. - The company differentiates itself with an API-first infrastructure model, aiming to power other platforms rather than building a consumer-facing application, and has transaction sizes ranging from $3,000 to over $1 million. - A key product feature is an AI-driven foreign exchange tool that allows finance teams to set target currency conversion rates, functioning similarly to a limit order in stock trading to optimize treasury operations. - This investment makes Xflow the first Indian fintech startup to be backed by both Stripe and PayPal Ventures, two of the world's largest payment infrastructure companies.
