inai Raises $4 Mn From Paua Ventures, 9Unicorns And Others

Fintech software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup inai on Monday announced to have raised around $4 million in a Seed round led by Berlin-based Paua Ventures and early-stage accelerator VC fund 9Unicorns. Uncommon Capital, Soma Capital, Anarko ventures, Better Capital, and Gemba Capital along with angel investors Sriram Krishnan, Lenny Rachitsky, Matt Robinson, Louis Beryl, Charlie Delingpole, Naren Shaam, and Kunal Shah also participated in the round.

The company will utilize the fresh capital to strengthen its technology team, expand its product portfolio, and build out its sales and marketing.

"While running our previous DTC business, we realized that with e-commerce going increasingly cross-border, optimizing 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 optimized 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 an e-commerce merchant or a SaaS business to sell across multiple geographies and localize the checkout experience," said Anantharaman Pattabiraman and Karthik Narayanan, co-founders, inai, in a joint statement.

Founded by serial entrepreneurs Anantharaman Pattabiraman and Karthik Narayanan in May this year, inai is segment for payments: inai is a no/low code platform that connects with multiple payment methods and payment gateways/processors in one simple integration. inai allows merchants to manage checkout, payments, subscriptions, refunds, cancellations, chargebacks across the globe along with the ability to orchestrate any business logic such as localizing 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.

"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," shared Federico Wengi, partner, Paua Ventures.

"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 e-commerce businesses to ramp up their operations without any technical expertise. In an increasingly digital economy like Asia, where e-commerce and cross-border e-commerce is on an upward growth trajectory, inai is well-poised to capitalize on the cross-border payments market," added Dr. Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, co-founder and managing director, 9Unicorns.

With cross-border e-commerce growing at two-time the pace of e-commerce and expected to reach $4.8 trillion by 2026, inai estimates that this is a large SaaS opportunity estimated to be $5 billion.