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

Xflow, an Indian fintech startup, has secured backing from both Stripe and PayPal Ventures in a $16.6 million funding round. The investment comes as the company works to carve out a position in cross-border B2B payments, a market still dominated by banks and manual processes.

The Series A round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from existing investors Square Peg, Stripe, Lightspeed, and Moore Capital, while PayPal Ventures joined as a new backer. The all-equity round values the Bengaluru-based startup at $85 million post-investment and brings its total funding to more than $32 million to date.

Despite rapid digitization in domestic payments, cross-border B2B transfers for Indian exporters remain heavily reliant on banks, often with limited visibility into fees, settlement timelines, and the final amount received in rupees. The friction is particularly acute for larger exporters moving millions of dollars into India to fund salaries and local operations, creating an opening for fintech infrastructure players such as Xflow that promise greater transparency and speed in international money movement.

Founded in 2021, Xflow provides cross-border payment infrastructure for businesses ranging from exporters and SaaS firms to platforms and freelancers, enabling them to collect international payments, manage foreign exchange, and settle funds in India.

“Cross-border B2B payments were stuck in a different age compared to UPI,” co-founder Anand Balaji (pictured above, center) said in an interview, referring to India’s widely used instant domestic payments network, the Unified Payments Interface.

Balaji, who previously helped build out Stripe’s India business, founded Xflow with former Stripe colleagues Ashwin Bhatnagar (pictured above, left) and Abhijit Chandrasekaran (pictured above, right).

Last year, Xflow said it enabled Indian businesses to collect payments from more than 100 countries in over 25 currencies. It processed close to $1 billion in annualized cross-border payment volume last year, marking roughly 10-fold growth from the same period in 2024, Balaji told TechCrunch.

According to the company, its customer base has expanded to about 15,000 businesses spanning SaaS firms, global capability centers (which are offshore units that multinationals operate in India), IT services exporters, freelancers, and fintech platforms.

Transaction sizes vary widely by segment, with global capability centers averaging about $1 million to $2 million per transaction, goods exporters around $30,000 to $40,000, and freelancers roughly $3,000, according to Balaji.

Xflow is positioning itself as a payments infrastructure provider rather than a direct payments application, offering APIs that allow platforms and exporters to embed cross-border money movement into their own products.

“We didn’t want to build the next Wise — we want to power the next thousand Wises,” Balaji said.

The startup has also introduced an AI-based foreign exchange tool to help finance teams optimize the timing of currency conversions. Xflow says the feature has generated incremental gains for some customers through data-driven foreign exchange decisions.

The tool allows businesses to set target conversion rates rather than accepting prevailing bank quotes. Balaji likened the feature to limit orders in trading — instructions to buy or sell only at a specified price.

“What we’ve added is the prediction layer and the ability to actually set a limit order,” he said. The model currently provides a three-day forecast with about 92% confidence, Balaji said, though TechCrunch could not independently verify that figure.

Xflow faces competition from banks that still dominate large cross-border B2B transfers, as well as fintech players such as Wise, Payoneer, and Skydo at the lower end of the market. But Balaji said the startup’s focus on high-value transactions and API-led infrastructure differentiates it from many rivals.

The startup plans to deploy the new capital toward building additional products on top of its core payments infrastructure and securing regulatory licenses in new markets, Balaji said. Xflow is preparing to roll out import capabilities in the coming months and is seeking licenses in Canada and Singapore, even as it remains focused on India as its primary market.

Xflow has also received in-principle approval from the Reserve Bank of India for a Payment Aggregator–Cross Border (PA-CB) license covering both exports and imports. The startup also has platform 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 strengthen the startup’s credibility with banking and regulatory partners, even as it continues to work with multiple payment providers commercially.

The startup currently has about 65 employees as it scales its cross-border infrastructure business.