PayPal Ventures Helps X-Border Payment Firm Xflow Raise $16 Million

India-based cross-border payments company Xflow raised $16.6 million in new funding.

“This milestone strengthens our mission to simplify cross-border payments for Indian exporters,” the company said in announcing its Series A round in a LinkedIn post Tuesday (Feb. 24). Investors included PayPal Ventures, Stripe, General Catalyst and others.

Xflow Head of Operations Rahul Unnikrishnan wrote in a separate post Tuesday that the round values the company at $85 million and that Xflow received PA-CB authorization for exports and imports from the Reserve Bank of India, the country’s central bank and banking regulator.

“Four years ago, Xflow was an idea we believed in,” Unnikrishnan wrote in the post. “Since then, it’s been steady, focused work—building real cross-border infrastructure, earning customer trust, tightening compliance, and improving the product week after week.”

Founded in 2021, Xflow provides cross-border payment infrastructure for India’s exporters.

“Cross-border B2B payments were stuck in a different age compared to UPI,” co-founder Anand Balaji said in an interview with TechCrunch, referring to the Unified Payments Interface, India’s popular instant payment system.

FinTechs have reshaped cross-border payments by approaching them not as a process, but as a product, PYMNTS reported Feb. 17. They simplified onboarding, clarified pricing and reduced settlement times by removing correspondent banking complexity. APIs permitted payment to be embedded into software platforms, allowing for new use cases and lowering entry barriers for smaller companies.

Meanwhile, cross-border payments are a “flashpoint” for anti-money laundering (AML) rules, PYMNTS reported Jan. 21. Each cross-border payment creates a chain of handoffs across banks, payment service providers, wallets and local payment rails. And each of those transactions can introduce opacity, latency and risk.

“The term ‘cross-border’ signifies that a payment traverses different legal entities, jurisdictions, regulatory frameworks, sanction regimes, and, in [some] cases, FX currency controls [also apply],” Emanuela Saccarola, Citi’s head of cross-border payments, services, said in an interview with PYMNTS in November. “This introduces additional challenges, including liquidity management, navigating multiple time zones, managing cut-off times and complying with the relevant regulations, which may not always be consistent.”