As India actively positions itself as a global leader in applied artificial intelligence, OpenAI has announced a strategic partnership with Pine Labs. This collaboration aims to integrate AI-driven reasoning directly into the fintech firm’s payments infrastructure, thereby automating critical settlement and invoicing workflows. Both companies believe this initiative will significantly accelerate the adoption of AI-led commerce throughout India.
The partnership, announced on Thursday, will involve Pine Labs embedding OpenAI’s application programming interfaces (APIs)—which are software tools designed to seamlessly integrate AI into existing systems—within its comprehensive payments and commerce infrastructure. The overarching goal is to enable highly efficient AI-assisted processes for settlement, reconciliation, and invoicing.
This agreement highlights OpenAI’s broader strategy to deepen its presence in India, one of its most rapidly expanding markets. The company is actively moving beyond its primary identity as the creator of ChatGPT, seeking to embed its technology across education, enterprise solutions, and infrastructure. Earlier this week, OpenAI also partnered with leading Indian engineering, medical, and design institutions to introduce AI tools into higher education, underscoring its belief that India's substantial developer base and over a billion internet users will be crucial to the next phase of global AI adoption.
Pine Labs has already internally adopted AI to automate portions of its settlement and reconciliation process, effectively reducing the time required for daily settlements from several hours to mere minutes, according to CEO B Amrish Rau. In an interview, Rau explained that 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 managed by AI-driven systems.
For Pine Labs, this partnership is designed to extend these proven AI-driven efficiencies beyond its internal operations to benefit merchants and corporate clients. Initially, the focus will be on business-to-business (B2B) use cases such as invoice processing, settlements, and payments orchestration, Rau told TechCrunch. He noted that the company anticipates faster adoption in B2B workflows, where AI agents can efficiently handle large volumes of repetitive financial tasks under predefined rules, before similar capabilities are introduced to consumer-facing payments.
“While there's much discussion around retail AI, the more substantial impact of these advancements truly lies in efficiency improvements, particularly within B2B,” Rau commented. He added, “Considering invoicing and settlement, these are workflows where AI agents can effectively manage the process from end to end, facilitating faster adoption.”
Rau indicated that the deployment of more autonomous, agent-led payment workflows is expected to progress more rapidly in international markets where existing regulations are conducive to such transactions. In contrast, India is likely to experience a more measured adoption, emphasizing AI-assisted commerce over entirely agent-initiated payments. He mentioned that Pine Labs is currently prototyping agent-driven payment solutions in select regions of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, even as Indian regulatory frameworks mandate stricter oversight on payment authorizations.
From OpenAI's perspective, this partnership offers a significant entry point deeper into India’s extensive payments and enterprise ecosystem, aligning with its strategy to transcend consumer-facing tools and embed its advanced models into high-volume, regulated operational workflows. Rau explained that the collaboration aims to enhance merchant loyalty and evolve Pine Labs' function from merely a payments processor into a comprehensive commerce platform, anticipating that increased transaction volumes will lead to incremental revenue over time.
According to its prospectus published last year, Pine Labs collaborates with over 980,000 merchants, 716 consumer brands, and 177 financial institutions. The company has cumulatively processed more than 6 billion transactions, valued at over ₹11.4 trillion (approximately $126 billion). Operating in 20 countries, including Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, various parts of Africa, the UAE, and the U.S., this extensive global presence ensures the OpenAI partnership will have significant reach across both Indian and international markets.
Rau clarified that the partnership does not entail revenue sharing between the two entities, meaning Pine Labs will not receive a commission if its merchants opt to integrate OpenAI's tools. He stated, “We’ve kept it completely independent of each other — anything related to payment and payment services, we will get the benefit of it, and anything related to OpenAI revenues will go to them.”
Furthermore, Rau noted that the arrangement is non-exclusive. He drew a parallel to OpenAI's collaboration with Stripe in the U.S., emphasizing that Pine Labs maintains an open stance toward future partnerships with other AI providers.
As Pine Labs integrates AI more profoundly into its payment systems, Rau affirmed that the company is developing additional security and compliance layers around these AI-driven workflows. This measure is crucial to safeguard sensitive merchant and consumer transaction data, with the primary focus being to ensure that all transactions remain secure and compliant, even as automation through AI expands.
Pine Labs' foray into AI-driven commerce is a continuation of prior initiatives by its Setu unit, which has actively explored agent-led bill payment experiences utilizing chatbots such as ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. Concurrently, India itself commenced piloting consumer payments directly through AI chatbots last year.
This significant announcement coincides with India's ongoing AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. The event serves as a platform for leading global AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, to present their latest innovations, alongside Indian startups showcasing AI applications designed for extensive deployment across critical sectors such as finance, healthcare, and education.
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