Launch YC S21: Meet the Batch, Thread #4
We are Anta and Karthik of Inai (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inai.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inai.io&#x2F;</a>), a platform for setting up and operating your payment stack. We let you offer local payment methods, support multiple business models (e-commerce, subscriptions , platforms) and localise the checkout experience by region of operation.<p>Setting up and maintaining a payment stack, especially if you operate in multiple regions, takes months of developer time. Most merchants set up their stacks ad hoc, leading to loss of revenue (e.g. if you don&#x27;t display Apple Pay in a certain way at checkout, Apple will penalize; same for Paypal) and wasted admin time (multiple dashboards for refunds, coupons etc). Working with a single payment provider locks the merchant in, as customer data is vaulted with the Payment Service Provider (PSP) making switching difficult. Meanwhile customer payment methods are exploding with newer rails like BNPLs (Buy Now Pay Later), open banking, QR code based and even crypto emerging rapidly<p>Karthik and I previously ran a DTC fitness business. Tailoring the payment stack to each market that we expanded into was a big pain. We spent weeks on every payment integration and our payment stack was a mess. We were after all running a fitness business and not a payments one.<p>At Inai, we provide a single unified API that connects to multiple payment providers (Stripe, Braintree), alternate payment methods (wallets, BNPLs etc). We make it easy to launch into new markets and to keep your service agnostic of PSP. For B2B companies, we make it easy to allow your customers to send invoice links and accept payments across cards and ACH.<p>We plan to give merchants a IFTTT dashboard to set up custom business logic (e.g. show Klarna, SOFORT, and cards in Germany but cards, Paypal, and Apple Pay in US). Merchants can view all transactions across providers, and very shortly will be able to manage chargebacks, refunds, and coupons, and get analytics on transactions (e.g. success rates by card&#x2F;PSP, insights on why transactions were declined).<p>Payment orchestration as a concept is not new, but medium sized merchants were not being served well with the existing solutions. We found that many merchants in this category had a knowledge gap with respect to payments and therefore needed someone to hand-hold and deliver outcomes for them, so fixing this is what we are focussed on.<p>We are building this product for merchants so if you have a use case that is currently not being served by our product, we would love to hear from you. Your problems and pain points will drive our roadmap.