OpenAI has entered into a strategic partnership with Pine Labs as part of its expanding India strategy, integrating advanced AI capabilities into the fintech firm’s payments and commerce infrastructure. The collaboration is aimed at embedding AI-driven reasoning into Pine Labs’ technology stack to automate settlement, reconciliation, and invoicing workflows.
Under the agreement, Pine Labs will incorporate OpenAI’s application programming interfaces (APIs) into its existing systems. These APIs allow enterprises to plug AI models directly into operational workflows, enabling AI-assisted processing across financial tasks. The companies said the move is designed to support faster and more efficient AI-led commerce in India.
The partnership reflects OpenAI’s broader effort to deepen its presence in India, one of its fastest-growing markets. The company is seeking to evolve beyond its identity as the creator of ChatGPT and embed its technology across education, enterprise systems, and infrastructure. Earlier this week, OpenAI collaborated with leading Indian engineering, medical, and design institutions to introduce AI tools into higher education, highlighting India’s large developer ecosystem and over a billion internet users as key drivers of global AI adoption.
Pine Labs has already deployed AI internally to streamline parts of its settlement and reconciliation processes. According to Chief Executive B Amrish Rau, the Noida-based fintech previously depended on manual verification by dozens of employees to reconcile funds from multiple banks before markets opened each day. With AI-driven systems in place, the time required to clear daily settlements has been reduced from hours to minutes.
The new partnership is intended to extend those efficiencies to merchants and enterprise clients. Rau told TechCrunch that Pine Labs sees strong early momentum in business-to-business use cases such as invoice processing, settlements, and payments orchestration. He emphasized that B2B environments, which involve high volumes of repetitive and rule-based financial tasks, are particularly well-suited for AI agents.
“People talk about retail AI, but the bigger impact of all of this is really efficiency improvement, especially in B2B,” Rau said. “If you look at invoicing and settlement, those are workflows where agents can actually drive the process end to end, and that’s where adoption can happen faster.”
Rau noted that fully autonomous, agent-led payment workflows are likely to roll out more quickly in overseas markets where regulations already support such transactions. In India, adoption is expected to be more gradual, with an initial focus on AI-assisted commerce rather than completely agent-initiated payments. Pine Labs is currently prototyping agent-driven payments in parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, while adhering to India’s stricter payment authorization requirements.
For OpenAI, the collaboration provides deeper access to India’s payments and enterprise landscape, particularly in high-volume and tightly regulated financial workflows. Rau said the objective is to enhance merchant stickiness and gradually evolve Pine Labs from a pure payments processor into a broader commerce platform. Increased transaction volumes over time could translate into incremental revenue for the fintech firm.
As Pine Labs integrates AI more deeply into its systems, the company is building enhanced security and compliance layers to safeguard sensitive merchant and consumer data. Rau stressed that ensuring transaction security and regulatory compliance remains central, even as automation increases.
The fintech’s interest in AI-enabled commerce builds on earlier experiments through its Setu unit, which has explored agent-led bill payments using chatbots such as ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. India also began piloting consumer payments via AI chatbots last year.
The announcement comes as India hosts its AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, where global AI firms including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are presenting new capabilities alongside Indian startups showcasing large-scale AI applications across finance, healthcare, and education sectors.
