As India emerges as a global hub for applied artificial intelligence, OpenAI has partnered with Pine Labs to integrate AI-based reasoning into the fintech firm’s payments stack, automating settlement and invoicing workflows, in a move the companies say could help accelerate AI-powered commerce in India.
The partnership will see Pine Labs integrate OpenAI’s application programming interfaces — software tools that allow companies to plug artificial intelligence into their existing systems — into its payments and commerce infrastructure, the companies said Thursday, all with the goal of enabling AI-assisted settlement, reconciliation and invoicing workflows.
The deal underscores OpenAI’s broader push to expand its footprint in India, one of its fastest-growing markets, as it looks to move beyond being primarily known as the maker of ChatGPT and integrate its technology into education, business and infrastructure. Earlier this week, OpenAI partnered with top Indian engineering, medical and design institutions to bring AI tools to higher education, betting that India’s large developer base and more than a billion internet users will play a central role in the next phase of AI adoption.
Pine Labs already uses artificial intelligence internally to automate parts of the settlement and reconciliation process, cutting the time it takes to clear daily settlements from hours to minutes, according to CEO B Amrish Rau. The Noida-based firm previously relied on manual checks by dozens of employees to process funds from multiple banks before markets opened each day, a workflow that is now largely handled by AI-based systems, he said in an interview.
For Pine Labs, the partnership is intended to extend these AI-based efficiencies beyond internal operations to merchants and enterprise customers, starting with business-to-business use cases like invoice processing, settlements and payment orchestration, Rau told TechCrunch. He noted that the company is seeing faster adoption in B2B workflows, where AI agents can handle large volumes of repetitive financial tasks according to predefined rules, before similar capabilities reach consumer-facing payments.
“People talk about retail AI, but the biggest impact of all of this is really improving efficiency, especially in B2B,” Rau said. “If you look at billing and settlement, those are workflows where agents can really drive the end-to-end process, and that’s where adoption can happen faster.”
The deployment of more autonomous, agent-driven payment workflows will move faster in overseas markets where regulations already allow such transactions, Rau said, while India is likely to see a more gradual adoption focused on AI-assisted commerce rather than fully agent-initiated payments. He said Pine Labs is already prototyping agent-based payments in parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, even as Indian regulations require tighter controls on how payments are authorized.
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For OpenAI, the partnership offers a path deeper into India’s payments and business ecosystem as it seeks to move beyond consumer-facing tools and integrate its models into high-volume, scalable workflows. Rau said the partnership aims to increase merchant stability and expand Pine Labs’ role from a payment processor to a broader commerce platform, with higher transaction volumes over time translating into incremental revenue.
Pine Labs says it works with more than 980,000 merchants, 716 consumer brands and 177 financial institutions and has processed more than 6 billion cumulative transactions worth more than ₹11.4 trillion (about $126 billion), according to its prospectus published last year. The fintech operates in 20 countries, including Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, parts of Africa, the UAE and the US, giving the OpenAI partnership reach in both the Indian and international markets.
Rau said the partnership involves no revenue sharing between the two companies, with Pine Labs not taking a cut if its marketers choose to integrate OpenAI’s tools. “We’ve kept it completely independent of each other – anything related to payments and payment services, we’ll benefit from that, and anything related to OpenAI revenue will go to them,” he said.
The deal, Rau added, is also non-exclusive. He compared it to OpenAI’s partnership with Stripe in the US and said Pine Labs remains open to working with other AI providers.
Rau said Pine Labs is building additional layers of security and compliance around AI-powered workflows to ensure sensitive merchant and consumer transaction data remains protected as the company integrates AI deeper into its payment systems. He said the focus is on ensuring transactions remain secure and compliant even as more workflows are automated by artificial intelligence.
Pine Labs’ interest in AI-based commerce builds on earlier work through its Setu unit, which has experimented with agent bill payment experiences using chatbots including ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude; Separately, India also began piloting consumer payments directly through AI chatbots last year.
The new announcement comes as India hosts the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, where global AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are showcasing their latest capabilities alongside Indian startups showcasing AI applications aimed at large-scale deployment in areas such as finance, healthcare and education.
