[Funding alert] YCombinator-backed fintech startup inai raises $4M from Paua Ventures, 9Unicorns, others

Fintech SaaS startup INAI on Monday raised around $4 million in a seed round led by Berlin-based Paua Ventures and 9Unicorns. Uncommon Capital, Soma Capital, Anarko Ventures, Better Capital, and Gemba Capital, along with angel investors — Sriram Krishnan, Lenny Rachitsky, Matt Robinson (Founder - GoCardless, Nested), Louis Beryl (Rocketplace, Earnest), Charlie Delingpole (Founder, Comply Advantage), Naren Shaam (Founder, Omio), and Kunal Shah (Founder, CRED) also participated in the round. 

According to the press statement, inai will utilise the fresh capital to strengthen its technology team, expand its product portfolio, and build on their sales and marketing. 

The startup is part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 cohort for startups. 

Founded by serial entrepreneurs Anantharaman Pattabiraman and Karthik Narayanan in May this year, inai allows merchants to manage checkout, payments, subscriptions, refunds, cancellations, and chargebacks across the globe, along with the ability to orchestrate any business logic such as localising the checkout by region, routing transactions intelligently or having failover logic to recover more transactions without needing any further developer involvement. Merchants can also connect with BI tools, fraud providers, invoicing, and tax tools. 

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Speaking on the fundraise, Anantharaman Pattabiraman and Karthik Narayanan, Founders, inai, said, 

“While running our previous DTC business, we realised that with ecommerce going increasingly cross-border, optimising the checkout experience for the customer in each market is extremely important. inai allows merchants to go live within 60 minutes with an international payment stack that is optimised for every market they want to operate in and take control of their payment data.

In addition, inai provides a rich software layer to support different subscription models for ecommerce merchants or SaaS businesses to sell across multiple geographies and localise the checkout experience.”

Sharing his thoughts, Federico Wengi, Partner at Paua Ventures, said, 

“As the online payments tech-stack get more sophisticated with new local payment methods, BNPL solutions (buy now pay later) and e-wallets, companies look for solutions to simplify and coordinate online payments. Inai taps into this large opportunity by offering a no-code software solution to simplify online payments once and for all. The experienced founding team has convinced us."

"We are impressed by Anta's and Karthik's energy and execution speed, and we love the fact that they know each other since they were kids and have co-founded a company together in the past that experienced the problem they are trying to solve now,” he added.

To this, Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Co-founder and Managing Director, 9Unicorns, added, 

“The key differentiating factor of this platform is that it enables merchants to set up their payment stack with a single integration. Merchants are not required to write any code, which makes it easier for startups and ecommerce businesses to ramp up their operations without any technical expertise. In an increasingly digital economy like Asia where ecommerce and cross border ecommerce is on an upward growth trajectory, inai is well-poised to capitalise on the cross border payments market.”

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