Attention MobiKwik, RazorPay and PayPal, Payments startup Stripe has just announced its entrance into the Indian mobile wallet sector!
“Today we’re starting an invite-only beta for Stripe in India with a small group of companies. These businesses will help us test our platform in the Indian market and provide feedback on features that we’ll need to build to support all Indian businesses looking to accept online payments and run their companies on Stripe,” blogged Stripe’s India Lead Anand Balaji. “Supporting Indian entrepreneurs is critical to our mission of expanding the GDP of the internet. Now more than ever, India is uniquely positioned to move more commerce online: In just the past two years, the percentage of India’s population connected to the internet has more than doubled to 500 million users. And in 2016, India saw more than twice the number of new businesses start as the United States.”
PayPal entered India this past November, offering Indian customers features such as One Touch, Buyer and Seller Protection and Return Shipping on Us.
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“With Stripe Atlas, we’ve already been able to help some Indian entrepreneurs build and scale global companies,” added Balaji. “However, we believe that by operating locally in India—with the ability for Indian companies to connect their local bank accounts to Stripe and get paid out in rupees—we can help support even more businesses and more types of business models (such as local marketplaces) in the years to come.”
Also during November Stripe enabled Hong Kong companies access full Stripe features such as Stripe Radar, Connect with Custom accounts and 3D Secure support. Stripe received seed funding from Y Combinator in 2010 – about the same time it received its first user. While originally launching in the US, the company has become a global operation. In 2014, Stripe became the very first major payment company to accept Bitcoin on its platform.