As India positions itself as a global hub for the use of artificial intelligence, OpenAI has partnered with Pine Labs to integrate AI-driven thinking into the fintech company’s payment stack, automated processing and invoicing workflows in a way the companies say can help accelerate AI-led commerce in India.
The partnership will see Pine Labs embed an OpenAI application programming interface — software tools that allow companies 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 payment, reconciliation, and invoicing 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 primarily known as the maker of ChatGPT and embed its technology in education, business, and infrastructure. Earlier this week, OpenAI partnered with India’s leading engineering, medical, and architecture institutions to bring AI tools to higher education, betting that India’s large engineering base and more than a billion internet users will play a key role in the next phase of AI adoption.
Pine Labs is already using AI internally to automate parts of its settlement and reconciliation process, reducing 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 multi-tasking checks to process funds from multiple banks before the market opened each day, a workflow that is now largely handled by AI-driven systems, he said in an interview.
At Pine Labs, the partnership is aimed at extending those AI-driven efficiencies beyond internal operations to vendors and corporate customers, starting with business-to-business use cases like invoice processing, settlement and payment orchestration, Rau told TechCrunch. He noted that the company is seeing rapid adoption of B2B workflows, where AI agents can handle large volumes of repetitive financial transactions under pre-defined rules, before the same capabilities reach consumer-facing payments.
“People talk about retail AI, but the biggest impact of all this is improved efficiency, especially in B2B,” Rau said. “If you’re looking at invoicing and reimbursement, that’s a workflow where agents can drive the process through, the quicker recovery can happen.”
The rollout of autonomous, agent-led operations will move faster in overseas markets where regulations already allow such to happen, Rau said, while India is likely to see a more gradual adoption focused on AI-assisted commerce instead of fully agent-initiated payments. He said Pine Labs already does agent-driven payments in certain parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, as Indian laws require stricter controls on how payments are authorized.
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For OpenAI, the partnership provides a deeper route into India’s payments and business ecosystem as it looks to move beyond consumer-facing tools and embed its models in high-volume, regulated flows. Rau said the partnership is aimed at increasing merchant loyalty and expanding Pine Labs’ role from a payment processor to a comprehensive commerce platform, with higher purchase volumes over time translating into increased 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 R11.4 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 OpenAI partnerships access to both Indian and international markets.
Rau said the partnership does not include profit sharing between the two companies, and Pine Labs does not take a cut if its vendors choose to embed OpenAI tools. “We have kept it completely independent from each other – anything related to payment services and payments, we will benefit from it, and anything related to OpenAI’s revenue will go to them,” he said.
The arrangement, adds Rau, is also not special. He compared it to OpenAI’s collaboration with Stripe in the US and said Pine Labs is still open to working with other AI providers.
Rau said Pine Labs is building additional layers of security and compliance around AI-driven workflows to ensure that sensitive merchant and consumer data remains secure, as the company integrates AI more deeply into its payment systems. He said the focus is on ensuring that transactions remain secure and compliant as other tasks are performed by AI.
Pine Labs’ interest in AI-driven commerce builds on previous work with its Setu unit, which piloted agent-led bill payment experiences using chatbots including ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Separately, India also started testing consumer payments directly through AI chatbots last year.
The new announcement comes as India hosts its AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, where global AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google showcase their latest capabilities and Indian startups showcase AI applications aimed at large-scale deployment across sectors such as finance, healthcare, and education.
