Ask Manish Maheshwari what has changed for Indian startups with global ambitions, and his answer is speed. Speaking at the 17th edition of TechSparks, the Managing Director of Stripe India said AI is changing how quickly, and how cheaply, a company can start selling to the world.
"We are seeing the creation of a new way of operating, the minimum viable company," Maheshwari told Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory and The Bharat Project, in a fireside chat on taking startups from early traction to global scale. "The entrepreneurs in India can think global and go global on day one now." The financial infrastructure platform helps companies of all sizes manage their payments.
Maheshwari had examples ready. Emergent, he said, reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in eight months, and Pocket FM has recently crossed half a billion in ARR. "If you had asked me two years ago which companies were hitting that level of revenue that fast, I could not have told you," he said.
Stripe's own numbers point the same way. Over the past five years, Maheshwari said, the number of companies using Stripe Atlas, its incorporation and compliance service, to collect money from more than 100 countries has quadrupled. And for most businesses, over a quarter of revenue now comes from outside their top 10 markets.
Stripe, valued at $160 billion and still pre-IPO, pitches itself as the layer that takes the pain out of all this. Maheshwari said founders should not be burning engineering hours on payments plumbing. "As a founder, you want to focus on your core product," he said. "If you are spending your engineering time customising your financial infrastructure, maybe you are not using your engineering in the best way." Stripe's idea, he said, is to make money programmable "through a single API". Founders need not even travel. "You can sit in India and sell to the world, and earn foreign exchange for your country."
Localisation, he argued, is where the money is. Stripe's data shows 76% of customers prefer to pay in their own currency, and that offering local payment methods beyond cards lifts revenue by roughly 12%. "You are leaving 12% of the money on the table by not offering them," he said. It matters for physical goods too, he added, pointing to Purely Copper, which makes copper bottles in India, has built a following in the US, and takes payments through Stripe before shipping.
The OpenRouter bet
Maheshwari confirmed that Stripe has agreed to acquire OpenRouter, a platform that routes AI queries to the most suitable model. The logic, he said, is that AI bills are climbing fast. "In some of the new-age companies, the amount of money people are spending on tokens is more than what they are spending on salaries."
Stripe already helps companies earn money through subscriptions, usage-based billing and invoicing. OpenRouter would help them keep a lid on what they spend. "If you want to build a solid P&L, you need great revenues, but you also have to keep your costs in control," he said. "That is when you make a profit."
Agents and checkout
An audience member asked whether AI agents will finally be able to complete payments on their own. Maheshwari said agentic commerce is "becoming more and more mainstream", at least in the US. He said Stripe's one-click payment product, Link, lets users authorise an agent to spend within a set limit, and that Stripe is helping shape payment protocols for agent-led shopping. "Stripe has a ringside view of this because we are integrated into all the major AI companies," he said. Retailers, he added, are already redesigning their websites so they are "machine readable as well" as human friendly.