As India establishes itself as a global hub for applied artificial intelligence, OpenAI said its partnership with Pine Labs can help accelerate AI-driven commerce in India by integrating AI-based inference into the fintech company’s payments stack and automating payment and invoicing workflows.
The partnership will see Pine Labs embed OpenAI’s application programming interfaces – software tools that allow businesses to connect AI to existing systems – within their payments and commerce infrastructure, the companies said Thursday. The goal of all this is to enable AI-enabled payment, reconciliation, and invoicing workflows.
The deal highlights OpenAI’s broader efforts to expand its presence in India, one of its fastest-growing markets. This is because beyond being primarily known as the maker of ChatGPT, it seeks to embed OpenAI’s technology into education, enterprises, and infrastructure. Earlier this week, OpenAI partnered with leading engineering, healthcare and design institutions in India to bring AI tools into higher education, confident that India’s large developer base and more than 1 billion internet users will play a central role in the next phase of AI adoption.
Pine Labs is already using AI internally to automate parts of the settlement and reconciliation process, cutting the time it takes to process daily settlements from hours to minutes, said Chief Executive Officer B Amrish Rau. The Noida-based company previously relied on manual verification by dozens of employees to process funds from multiple banks before the markets opened each day, but these workflows are now largely handled by AI-based systems, he said in an interview.
For Pine Labs, the partnership is intended to extend AI-powered efficiencies beyond internal operations to merchant and enterprise customers, starting with B2B use cases such as invoicing, settlement and payment reconciliation, Rau told TechCrunch. He noted that companies are seeing faster adoption of B2B workflows, where AI agents can process high volumes of repetitive financial tasks according to predefined rules, before similar capabilities reach consumer-facing payments.
“People talk about retail AI, but the bigger impact of all this is increased efficiency, especially in B2B,” Rau said. “If you look at invoicing and settlement, these are workflows where agents can actually drive the process from start to finish, and that can drive adoption faster.”
Rau said the rollout of more autonomous, agent-led payment workflows will happen more quickly in overseas markets where regulations already allow for such transactions. India, on the other hand, is likely to see gradual adoption focused on AI-enabled commerce rather than fully agent-led payments. He said Pine Labs is already creating agent-based payment prototypes in parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, despite Indian regulations requiring strict controls on how payments are accepted.
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For OpenAI, this partnership provides a deeper path into India’s payments and enterprise ecosystem as it seeks to move beyond consumer-facing tools and embed its models into high-volume, regulated workflows. Rau said the collaboration aims to increase merchant loyalty and expand Pine Labs’ role from a payment processor to a broader commerce platform, translating higher transaction volumes into increased revenue over time.
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 rupees (about $126 billion), according to a prospectus published last year. The fintech operates in 20 countries, including Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, parts of Africa, UAE and the US, enabling the OpenAI partnership to expand across both Indian and international markets.
Rau said the partnership does not involve revenue sharing between the two companies, and Pine Labs does not get a cut if sellers choose to embed OpenAI tools. “We have kept them completely independent of each other. Anything related to payments and settlement services will benefit from it, and anything related to OpenAI revenue will go to them,” he said.
Rau added that the agreement is also non-exclusive. He compared it to Stripe’s partnership with OpenAI in the US and said Pine Labs remains open to collaboration with other AI providers.
Rau said Pine Labs is building additional layers of security and compliance around AI-based workflows to protect sensitive merchant and consumer transaction data as it integrates AI deeper into payments systems. He said the focus is on ensuring transactions are safe and compliant even as more workflows are automated by AI.
Pine Labs’ interest in AI-powered commerce builds on previous work with its Setu unit, which experimented with agent-led bill payment experiences using chatbots, including ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Separately, India also began piloting direct consumer payments through AI chatbots last year.
The new announcement comes as India hosts the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. At the summit, global AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are showcasing their latest capabilities alongside Indian startups demonstrating AI applications aimed at large-scale deployment across sectors such as finance, healthcare, education, and more.
