With businesses increasingly going digital and cross-border commerce becoming more commonplace, it has become essential for merchants and service providers to offer convenient, safe and comprehensive payment methods to attract and retain online consumers.

Sample this. A 2019 study found that 54 per cent of online shoppers abandon their carts due to the lengthy checkout process, requiring them to create an account with the merchant. While another study in 2020 noted that 42 per cent of the US consumers stop their purchase if their favourite payment method is not available.

As digital businesses expand into new markets, it is essential to integrate multiple payment methods, accept local currencies, and provide consumers with a seamless checkout experience. But building all of these may require huge investments and hiring skilled developers.

International payment stack

Here’s where inai Technologies, a Chennai-based fintech SaaS start-up comes in. A no-code platform, inai helps Indian companies scale their business globally by enabling them to launch, manage and scale an international payment stack in a few minutes.

“We enable digital businesses to go live and accept payments from across six continents in just 60 minutes. That is our USP,” said Karthik Narayanan, CTO & Co-founder, inai Technologies.

“Suppose a business wants to collect payments from multiple countries, each of the countries will have 2-3 payment gateways in addition to prominent payment methods like debit card, credit card and net banking etc. You need to write custom code to integrate each of these payment methods. But, we have abstracted all of this under one single interface,” he added.

Founded by serial entrepreneurs Anantharaman Pattabiraman and Karthik Narayanan in March 2021, inai is part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 cohort for startups.

A full-stack payments integration provider, inai offers payment solutions to industries like e-commerce, digital content, edtech, gaming, movies, travel and marketplace. It currently serves merchants operating out of India and South-East Asia.

“We are focussed on the B2C facing side of payments particularly those that are taking payments from multiple geographies are our sweet spot,” Anantharaman Pattabiraman, CEO & Co-founder, inai Technologies, said.

In the last three months, inai’s monthly recurring revenue (MRR) has grown over 30 times. “We have very good visibility on MRR growth for the foreseeable future,” Pattabiraman said.

inai currently has three different plans : start up, growing companies, and an enterprise plan. Its payment solutions are available under three different methods, including no-code method (for non-engineers to build payment gateways without need for writing codes), Low-code method (with minimum need for code writing) and a proper coding method (built for companies which have in-house payment technology teams).

Fundraising

In September 2021, inai raised $4 million in a seed round led by Paua Ventures and 9Unicorns. The startup will use the funds to strengthen its technology team, expand its product portfolio and build its sales and marketing team.

“Currently, we have around 26 members and we are planning to double this headcount over the next 2 quarters,” Narayanan said.

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