OpenAI deepens India efforts with Pine Labs fintech partnership

As India promotes itself as a global hub for applied artificial intelligence, OpenAI has partnered with Pine Labs to integrate AI-based logic into the fintech company’s payments suite, automating settlement processes and invoicing workflows in a move the companies say could help accelerate AI-led commerce in India.

The partnership will see Pine Labs embed OpenAI APIs — software tools that allow businesses to plug AI into their existing systems — within its payments and commerce infrastructure, the companies said Thursday, all with the goal of enabling AI-assisted settlement, reconciliation, and billing workflows.

The deal underscores OpenAI’s broader push to expand its presence in India, one of its fastest-growing markets, as it looks to move beyond being known primarily as a ChatGPT maker and integrate its technology into education, enterprise and infrastructure. Earlier this week, OpenAI partnered with leading 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, reducing the time it takes to settle daily settlements from hours to minutes, according to CEO B Amresh Rao. The Noida-based company previously relied on manual checks by dozens of employees to process funds from multiple banks before markets opened each day, a workflow now largely handled by artificial intelligence-based systems, he said in an interview.

For Pine Labs, the partnership aims to expand those AI-driven efficiencies beyond internal operations to include merchants and business customers, starting with B2B use cases like invoice processing, reconciliations and payment coordination, Rau told TechCrunch. He noted that the company sees faster adoption in B2B workflows, where AI agents can handle large volumes of repetitive financial tasks under pre-defined rules, before similar capabilities reach consumer-facing payments.

“People talk about AI in retail, but the biggest impact of all of this is really improving efficiency, especially in the B2B space,” Rao said. “If you look at billing and reconciliation, those are the workflows where agents can drive the process from start to finish, and that’s where adoption can happen faster.”

The launch of more autonomous agent-led payment workflows will move faster in overseas markets where regulations already allow such transactions, while India is likely to see a more gradual adoption focused on AI-assisted commerce rather than entirely agent-initiated payments, Rao said. Pine Labs is already prototyping agent-driven payments in parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, even as Indian regulations require stricter controls on how payments are allowed, he said.

For OpenAI, the partnership provides a deeper inroad into India’s enterprise and payments ecosystem as it looks to move beyond consumer-facing tools and embed its models into structured, high-volume workflows. Rao said the collaboration aims to increase business stickiness and expand Pine Labs’ role from a payments processor to a broader commerce platform, with higher transaction volume over time translating into additional 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 INR 11.4 trillion (about US$126 billion), according to a prospectus it 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 access to Indian and international markets.

The partnership does not involve revenue sharing between the two companies, with Pine Labs not getting a share if its merchants choose to include OpenAI tools, Rao said. “We’ve kept them completely independent from each other — anything to do with payments and payment services, we’ll benefit from them, and anything to do with OpenAI revenue will go to them,” he said.

The arrangement is also non-exclusive, Rao added. He compared it to OpenAI’s partnership with Stripe in the US, and said Pine Labs remains open to working with other AI providers.

Pine Labs is building additional layers of security and compliance around its AI workflows to ensure merchant and consumer transaction data remains protected, Rao said, as the company integrates AI more deeply into its payments systems. The focus is on ensuring transactions remain secure and compliant even as more workflows are automated by artificial intelligence, he said.

Pine Labs’ interest in AI-driven commerce builds on previous work through its Setu unit, which has piloted agent-led bill payment experiments using chatbots including ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Separately, India also began trialling direct consumer payments through AI-powered 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 will showcase their latest capabilities alongside Indian startups showcasing AI applications aimed at widespread deployment across sectors such as finance, healthcare and education.