Y Combinator-backed Inai raises $4 mn led by Berlin-based Paua Ventures, others

Inai, a fintech SaaS startup, said it has raised $4 million (Rs 29.4 crore) in a seed round led by Berlin-based Paua Ventures, 9Unicorns, Uncommon Capital, Soma Capital, Anarko Ventures, Better Capital, and Gemba Capital.

The round also saw Sriram Krishnan, Lenny Rachitsky, GoCardless founder Matt Robinson, Nested, Louis Beryl of Rocketplace, Earnest, Comply Advantage founder Charlie Delingpole, Omio founder Naren Shaam, and CRED founder Kunal Shah.    

Inai said it will use the fresh capital to strengthen its technology team, expand its product portfolio, and build out its sales and marketing. The startup is part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 cohort.  

Founded by Anantharaman Pattabiraman and Karthik Narayanan in May, Inai allows merchants to manage checkout, payments, subscriptions, refunds, cancellations, and chargebacks across the globe.    

“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,” Pattabiraman and Narayanan said in a statement.    

In addition, Inai provides a software layer to support different subscription models for an e-commerce merchant or a SaaS business to sell across multiple geographies and localise the checkout experience.    

With cross-border e-commerce growing two times faster than e-commerce and expected to reach $4.8 trillion by 2026, Inai estimates the SaaS opportunity to be $5 billion. 

Fintech investments in India have risen 25% in the first half of 2021 year on year at $2,054 million, going by a KPMG report which covered private equity, venture capital and M&A deals.  

Investments totalled $1.64 billion in the first six months of 2020 and $2.249 billion for the whole of last year.