Innoviti Introduces India’s First AI-driven UPI Acquirer Backup Application for Organized Retail

Innoviti Technologies Pvt. Ltd., India’s largest payments-centric retail SaaS platform for enterprise brands and their SME channel partners, have today announced the launch of India’s first AI-driven UPI Acquirer Backup Application for offline organized retailers. This application automatically activates a secondary UPI acquirer for UPI Dynamic QR transactions if the primary acquirer becomes unreliable. This breakthrough not only enhances transaction reliability and customer experience but also helps retailers save up to 6% on digital payment processing costs.

Organized retailers have saved heavily on MDR costs with the mass adoption of UPI by consumers. However, credit cards, a high MDR cost payment instrument, remains as the preferred mode for high ticket purchases leading to blended MDR costs of up to 60 bps. This worsens when an UPI acquirer fluctuates or fails. Problems begin at the checkout counter as customers irritated by delays switch to credit cards. Some payment providers offer a manual workaround – store staff can press a button on the EDC to switch acquirers after a failure, but by then it is too late. The irate customer would have already handed over a credit card and the staff would have quickly swiped it to avoid losing a sale. The result - zero-cost UPI transaction would have turned into a high MDR credit card payment, eroding the retailer’s margins without any increase in revenue. A poor checkout experience adding to the retailer’s woes.

UPI Dynamic QR transactions being a push system does not render itself to conventional payment orchestration. As a result, till now there was no intelligent router to manage acquirer failures. Innoviti’s UPI Acquirer Backup Application solves this challenge using AI unsupervised learning, that models the behavior of each UPI acquirer system based on past data and then monitors live traffic to automatically switch to an alternative acquirer before the failure occurs. The application allows merchants to set preferences and routing rules for their favored acquirers. Innoviti has already rolled out this application with some of India’s largest retailers, helping them cut MDR costs by up to 6%. The consumer experience is also enhanced with fewer failures and lesser checkout time. The new application also ensures that the switching does not affect the reconciliation in any way.

The company’s flagship product “innoviti unipay” is a payment reconciliation software. It powers payments at India’s largest retailers and is profitable with an EBITDA of 25%+. Innoviti genie is a sales acceleration software designed for electronics merchants with high agency, helping them compete better by giving access to not only distributor cash discounts and OEM dealer margins but also a whole set of sales management tools. Innoviti genie doubled its revenue in FY24-25 and is slated to breakeven at an operating level in FY26. In December 2024, Innoviti launched its payment collection app “innoviti link” for neighborhood merchants to help them expand their selling universe to remote customers without the anxiety of collections. This was developed under Innoviti’s online PA license received from RBI. The app has shown a rapid adoption as is the highest ranked payment link apps in both the App Store and Play Store. It is targeted to cover 30,000 merchants by March 2026.

The company is operating at an annualized run-rate of Rs. 150 Cr. and is targeting a full year of operating profitability in FY26, setting the stage for a proposed IPO by Mar 2026.

“Both consumers and merchants prefer to pay through UPI given its ease and commercial advantage. However, acquirer failures are an unavoidable aspect of any payment technology,” said Ms. Amrita Malik, Co-founder & President, Innoviti.

“We are excited to introduce AI in this space, enabling the systems to dynamically monitor real-time traffic and automatically re-route UPI transactions through alternate performing acquirers. This breakthrough can help merchants reduce their digital payment processing costs by up to 6%, while significantly enhancing the customer checkout experience.”

About Innoviti Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Innoviti provides payments-centric retail SaaS software to enterprise brands and their SME channel partners, giving them a competitive edge to help them grow faster, smarter, and with less efforts than possible with traditional payment solutions. Innoviti’s software run across online and offline payment channels, processing over ₹80,000 Cr. annually across 2,000 cities, serving over 6,000 merchants online and 20,000 merchants offline.

The company processes more than 50% of all purchases happening in enterprise retailers in the food & grocery, lifestyle, and healthcare categories.

Backed by marquee investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, USA, FMO, Netherlands, Catamaran Ventures (Mr. Narayana Murthy’s family office), India, and the Patni Family Office, India, Innoviti is the recipient of RBI’s final authorization to operate as an online payment aggregator. The company has several accolades to its name including the 50 fastest growing companies in Asia award from Deloitte (won four times), Reliance Innovation Award, and the Mastercard Innovation Award. Innoviti’s technology edge is visible through the 11 patents awarded, with 16 more in pipeline.

Singapore-based Panthera Growth Leads $45M Series D Funding in Innoviti

Mr. Rajeev Agarwal, CEO & Founder, Innoviti

Singapore-based growth equity firm Panthera Growth Partners (PGP) is the lead investor in a $45M combination Series D fund-raise by Innoviti Payment Solutions Pvt Ltd, India’s leading Collaborative Commerce Platform.

Panthera has invested $15M from its recently announced Fund II, along with new investors including Alumni Ventures, Patni Family Office and existing investors FMO and Bessemer Venture Partners, Netherlands. Innoviti has also raised debt from Trifecta Capital in this round. A clutch of individual investors such as Sanjoy Bhattacharya, Bharat Jaisinghani, and others also participated in this funding round.

Digital businesses are finding it hard to scale up profitably, Innoviti provides a collaborative commerce platform that helps them collaborate with other businesses and acquire customers together. They can partner to turn payment transactions into new and unique purchase tools that urge consumers to buy better products and more products, right at the point of purchase. Enriching payment channels with data technology, Innoviti’s collaborative commerce platform is ushering in a new wave of sales acceleration tools for digital businesses.

More than 20,000 retailers from 2000 cities participate in Innoviti's platform, which handles more than 90 million unique customers' purchases each year. Innoviti processes over Rs 75,000 Cr. ($10 billion) in annualized purchase volume and holds a commanding market share of > 70% in the enterprise sector. The company offers grocery, fashion, healthcare, and electronics retailers with category-specific purchase solutions. Launched in 2021, Innoviti’s GENIE product for mid-market mobile retailers has seen a runaway success by providing attractive affordability (EMI/BNPL) solutions for consumers. It has already clocked more than Rs. 1000 Cr. of annualized GTV.

The funds raised will be used to expand the company’s mid-market product lines in electronics, fashion, and grocery. It will also be utilized for building products on top of UPI payment channels, enhancing product distribution, and making strategic acquisitions in the marketing technology and data sciences fields. Avendus Capital was the exclusive financial advisor to Innoviti in this transaction.

The company plans to double revenues in 2022–2023. The enterprise division of the company is already profitable, and it expects to reach total break-even within the current financial year.

Rajeev Agrawal, CEO, Innoviti, said, “We are happy to have Panthera join, guide, and support us in our journey of becoming the purchase partner to every Indian. PGP has had a track record of backing highly differentiated businesses that have created lasting value in the Indian start-up ecosystem. We are super excited that they decided to back us and look forward to the same magic here. One needs to design easy-to-use flexibility with military grade reliability and that too at scale for exceptional customer experience, we are proud to have done that. Our four patents, including one US patent are proof of that. This has translated into our collaborative commerce platform powering more than 70% of purchases that happen digitally in enterprise retail today.”

Panthera GP was founded in 2021 and recently announced the first close of its USD 250 million second Fund. Fund I, has backed sector leading companies such as BigBasket, Pepperfry, Zivame, OfBusiness, etc.

Panthera’s Founder and Managing Partner, Shilpa Kulkarni, said, “As a growth-stage investor focused on disruptive technology led businesses, we are excited to partner with Innoviti. Innoviti’s cutting edge solutions help turn simple payment transactions into powerful purchase tools. We look forward to joining Innoviti on the journey to become a purchase partner for every consumer.”

“Our solutions are crafted for Indian retail, building in nuances of Indian consumers and merchants. We are excited about how our platform is helping digital businesses struggling with high costs of conversion (due to higher competition) find new ways of growing profitably. This is a problem not only for Enterprises, but also for Mid-Market businesses who are facing increased competition from large players. This customer centricity and a relentless focus on excellence has helped us become the most capital efficient company in this space. With the current Series D, we hope to become a sustainable business and list on the exchanges over the next couple of years,” Rajeev Agrawal added.

Innoviti Granted US Patent on its Technology for Secure QR Communication Between Terminal Devices and Target Systems

Innoviti Granted US Patent on its Technology for Secure QR Communication Between Terminal Devices and Target Systems(Patent portfolio expands to 4, with 26 more in pipeline)

Communication security is a key consideration for safe transfer of payment information from a consumer facing product – such as a terminal, website, or mobile app to a payment processing server for authorization. Common security lapses can lead to a) stealing of customer identify, b) change in merchant identity and c) change in transaction amount. Any such lapse would lead to loss of money for the customer and merchant, besides inconvenience to all parties. Security lapses can erode consumer and merchant confidence and are the single biggest factor that can affect the growth of digital payments. 

Innoviti's patent furthers the advancement of secure communications in payment systems.

The patent aims to address certain security challenges that arise in push payment systems, where the merchant (payee) identity capture is disconnected from the payment processing step. Most popular payment methods are pull based, e.g., card payments at a store or online, mobile payments online etc. The merchant sends a debit request to the customer's bank in a single connection-oriented protocol. The challenges if any arise in validating the bonafides of the customer, which are authenticated through a second factor. 

However, in push payments the challenges are related to capture of the merchant's identity. A possible hack of the merchant's identity and its replacement with a false one can lead to the consumer getting debited but a fraudulent account getting credited. A possible use case is in unassisted QR payments, e.g., vending machines, self-check-out, etc., where an unauthorized, random substitution of the QR can cause this issue. Innoviti's patent aims to address these situations through a technology innovation at the network layer that eliminates this possibility.

Commenting on the development, Mr. Amit Ahuja, SVP Technology, Innoviti, said, "Innoviti desires to become the purchase partner to every Indian by helping them make better purchase decisions. We do this by developing sophisticated technology and delivering it through simple, exceptionally crafted purchase experiences. This is hard, very hard to put together. Our patents are a demonstration of the sophisticated technology required to deliver such exceptional experiences. These patents are also a great recognition of the exceptional talent that exists in Innoviti. Further, they not only help us protect our customers against claims by other parties but are also a mechanism for us to deter replication of our technology by competition. We are proud to receive a US grant for this patent. Through these patents, in our own small way, we hope to contribute to the "Make in India, For the World" mission. We have 26 more patents in the pipeline and over the next couple of years plan to increase this to a portfolio of 100+ patents."

Innoviti has developed a collaborative commerce platform that enables businesses to partner on payment transactions and turn them into powerful purchase tools that help consumers buy better products and more products. Merchants, banks, and brands come together on Innoviti's platform to create such purchase tools. The platform is delivered as software applications that run on payment terminals and mobile and web applications, helping the merchants drive more customers, more sales, and more profits than possible otherwise. This technology will further enhance the reliability of Innoviti's products, providing a virtually zero error system that will help boost the consumer-merchant purchase experience.

Based on deep consumer insights, Innoviti's products are crafted using superior technology that has translated into higher GTV per point of purchase than anyone else in the market, and a continuously increasing take rate per $ of GTV. Processing over Rs. 75,000 Cr. of annualized purchase volume, Innoviti's flagship uniPAYNext product commands a dominant market share of 76% in the large enterprise category, providing category specific purchase tools to grocery, fashion, healthcare, and electronics merchants.

Innoviti had raised a Series D round of Rs. 80 Cr. in December 2020, towards fueling the expansion of its mid-market product GENIE. Within the past few months GENIE has rapidly grown to driving Rs. 1,000 Cr. of annualized GTV that is targeted to grow to Rs. 7000 Cr. over next twelve months. Innoviti's highly differentiated product strategy backed by modern enterprise grade technology has not only driven a rapid growth trajectory, but also a highly profitable one with gross margins more than 70%. The company's enterprise business has been EBITDA positive since October 2020.

Innoviti Granted Patent on Its Payment Technology Solution for Double Debits in Digital Payments

Patent portfolio expands to 4, with 26 more in pipeline

Double debit is a common problem in payments. It is used to describe a scenario where due to network unreliability the customer's money gets debited for a purchase while the merchant does not get credit. The merchant does not hand over the goods, asking the customer to pay again, leading to a double debit for the customer. The customer chases their bank to reverse the first transaction, leading to inconvenience. This problem is one of the biggest contributors to customer grievance with digital payments. The scenario also leads to erosion of merchant’s confidence with digital payments. Innoviti’s patent provides a technology solution to this.

The patent aims to address the unreliability of mobile networks. Virtually 100% of mobile and web consumer applications send data over TCP/IP networks. TCP/IP, the most common network protocol was designed in the 1970s by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, often called as the fathers of Internet. The protocol was primarily designed for wired networks prevalent at that time. Most modern applications however work on wireless networks, which behave somewhat differently. These applications however use TCP/IP at network level leading to some unusual situations that are the primary cause of this unreliability. Innoviti’s patent aims to address these situations through a novel application layer technology that rides on the same network layer.

Mr. Rajeev Agrawal, CEO & Founder, Innoviti

Innoviti has developed a collaborative commerce platform that enables businesses to partner on payment transactions and turn them into powerful purchase tools that help consumers buy better products and more products. Merchants, banks, and brands come together on Innoviti’s platform to create such purchase tools.

The platform is delivered as software applications that run on payment terminals and mobile and web applications, helping the merchants drive more customers, more sales, and more profits than possible otherwise. This technology will further enhance the reliability of Innoviti’s products, providing a virtually zero error system that will help boost the consumer-merchant purchase experience.

Based on deep consumer insights, Innoviti’s products are crafted using superior technology that has translated into higher GTV per point of purchase than anyone else in the market, and a continuously increasing take rate per $ of GTV. Processing over Rs. 75,000 Cr. of annualized purchase volume, Innoviti’s flagship uniPAYNext product commands a dominant market share of 76% in the large enterprise category, providing category specific purchase tools to grocery, fashion, healthcare, and electronics merchants.

“Innoviti desires to become the purchase partner to every Indian by helping them make better purchase decisions. We do this by developing sophisticated technology and delivering it through simple, exceptionally crafted purchase experiences. This is hard, very hard to put together. Our patents are a demonstration of the sophisticated technology required to deliver such exceptional experiences.

These patents are also a great recognition of the exceptional talent that exists in Innoviti. Further, they not only help us protect our customers against claims by other parties but are also a mechanism for us to deter replication of our technology by competition. The great encouragement and support infrastructure provided by the Government of India to start-ups has been instrumental in our drive to protect technology developed in India. Through these patents, in our own small way, we hope to contribute to the “Make in India, For the World” mission. We have 26 more patents in the pipeline and over the next couple of years plan to increase this to a portfolio of 100+ patents.” – said Mr. Rajeev Agrawal, CEO, Innoviti.

Innoviti had raised a Series D round of Rs. 80 Cr. in December 2020, towards fueling the expansion of its mid-market product GENIE. Within the past few months GENIE has rapidly grown to driving Rs. 1,000 Cr. of annualized GTV that is targeted to grow to Rs. 7000 Cr. over next twelve months. Innoviti’s highly differentiated product strategy backed by modern enterprise grade technology has not only driven a rapid growth trajectory, but also a highly profitable one with gross margins more than 70%. The company’s enterprise business has been EBITDA positive since October 2020.

Innoviti Becomes India's 1st Payments SaaS Firm to Receive Coveted SOC3 Seal of Excellence for Adhering to Trust Services Principles

Reaffirms commitment to excellence in adhering to availability and processing integrity of its systems and processes

• Innoviti announced today that it has been awarded the SOC Compliance Seal (SOC2 and SOC3 reports for uniPAYNEXT application) as per the AICPA's SSAE 18 standards issued by an independent Third-Party CPA firm (Ernst & Young Associates LLP). This is in recognition of Innoviti's software and processes conforming to standards of excellence in managing security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy of all shared data and information.
• Innoviti processes over US$ 6.5 billion of annualized offline merchant payment volume (~5% of India's offline merchant volume, based on RBI data), turning payment transactions into business collaborations by creating software that brings merchants, banks, brands together to create new and unique ways of providing superior experiences to their common consumers. 
• Innoviti's payment solutions provide services to marquee clients such as Reliance Retail, Tanishq, Lifestyle, Max Retail, Shoppers Stop, Apollo Hospitals, Fortis Hospitals, Manipal Hospitals and over 400 other national and regional retail chains. Transactions originate from over 100,000 points of transaction from 1000+ cities, with the 2X higher volume from every point of transaction than national average. These transactions are in turn connected to more than 100 banks and brands, creating a complex intelligent network of networks.
• Under SOC3, Innoviti's assertions about a) detection of communication failure and auto-switching to alternate communication means, b) detection of banking and other partners response failures and auto-switching to alternate providers using acquirer fallback feature, c) procedures for recording and displaying transaction time and d) procedures for configuring promotion schemes (such as least cost routing, cashback and EMI schemes) have been evaluated and found to be meeting the strict trust criteria of AICPA. 
• This development is in continuation of Innoviti's Series C fund raise, one of the end-uses of which was to enhance the software technology to meet the highest standards of systems and process delivery. This not only helps customers reduce anxiety, but also provides them highly differentiated services at scale to drive extra sales and extra customers.

"Processing payments reliably requires managing quality at scale. Rather than just making claims about our superior reliability and marketing service capabilities, we wanted to have an independent authority validate the same. We are proud to become the first Indian payments SaaS company to receive this seal of excellence.

SOC3 is the most definitive seal when it comes to adhering to principles of trust services. It establishes the organizations unquestioned commitment to excellence in managing availability and processing integrity of systems and processes, besides security, confidentiality and privacy of shared data and information. We subjected our systems and processes around reliability and promotion configurations and management to the strict principles of AICPA and are assertions about our methods and systems have been found to be true.

A key differentiator for us has been developing sophisticated technology and delivering it through simple, exceptionally crafted payment experiences. This is hard, very hard to put together. We are proud to have done that.

We are committed to ensuring that our marquee customers and partners get the best possible payment solutions on this planet, this seal is a huge endorsement of our mission," - said Mr. Gaurav Mehrotra, Vice President, Technology, Innoviti.

About Innoviti Payment Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Innoviti Payment Solutions Pvt. Ltd. has been a pioneer in the use of technology to add intelligence to payment transactions, helping extract the full power of digital payments to drive business growth. As consumer centric businesses transform themselves digitally, Innoviti believes that the point of payment will play a pivotal role in connecting merchants to brands and banks, enabling them to discover and deliver new and unique experiences to their common customers. Innoviti's indigenously developed platform processes over 6.5B$ of offline merchant payments from over 1000+ cities in India, with a volume throughput that is 2X of the country's average. The company is winner of several awards including Reliance's Most Promising Growth Consumer Finance Award for its #KuchBhiOnEMI innovation in 2019. The company has several national and international patents filed for its technology with two awarded. Catamaran Ventures, India, SBI Capital, Japan, Bessemer Ventures, USA and FMO, Netherlands are investors in the company.

Innoviti Launches Saadhan POS for Instant UPI and RuPay Acceptance Enablement at B2B Businesses

Leading payment solutions provider, Innoviti Payment Solutions, announced the launch of its new Saadhan POS solution which is specifically designed to provide B2B businesses a quick and convenient packaged option, to become compliant with the recently announced Regulatory requirements that mandate compulsory provision of UPI and RuPay acceptance modes at all businesses with annual turnover exceeding Rs. 50 Cr.

The new Saadhan POS comes pre-enabled to accept both RuPay Debit Cards as well as UPI-QR transactions, enabling B2B businesses to accept payments from their business customers through any of these options. All RuPay debit card and UPI transactions on Saadhan POS will have zero charges. The POS will additionally accept Visa and Master issued credit and debit cards. It will, therefore, provide businesses the benefit of accepting all forms of payments on a single unified POS device, greatly simplifying backend reconciliation of payments. A specially designed benefit of the Saadhan POS solution for merchants, is that it comes pre-packaged with all necessary back-end transaction acquiring arrangements with acquiring banks, thereby enabling the Saadhan POS to be activated for the merchant within 15 minutes, in sharp contrast to existing industry norm of nearly 1-2 weeks.

Additionally, the Saadhan POS is complemented by a convenient mobile phone-based Tracking App that allows the merchant to track his transaction processing and settlement on a real-time basis across both RuPay and UPI transactions. It also provides merchants the additional feature flexibility of processing transaction through either the regular route or as EMI billing transactions.

Speaking about the launch, Ms. Amrita Malik, Chief Business Officer, Innoviti, said, "Consistent innovation to meet rapidly evolving business needs of our merchant partners is at the very core of Innoviti's DNA. The recent regulatory changes making UPI and RuPay Debit acceptance mandatory for specified businesses has created a need amongst our partners for a simple one-stop solution that can be enabled quickly to meet regulatory deadlines. The new Saadhan POS is carefully designed to meet those expectations and we are delighted with the response it is getting from our retailer partners."

Across India, Innoviti processes over US$ 6.5Bn of payments annually from over 1000+ cities, with a throughput per point of acceptance of 7000$, 2X of India's average (as per RBI data). Innoviti's payment solutions help merchants, banks and brands influence commercial transactions happening in offline commerce more efficiently than possible otherwise, through unconventional use of payment terminals.



Innoviti is backed by marquee investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, USA, SBI Venture Capital, Singapore and Catamaran, India.

Innoviti Payment Solutions runs a payment platform that has a unique ability to add intelligence to traditional payment channels, enhancing their value. Merchants, brands and financial service providers use these intelligent payment channels to reduce cost and drive sales of their products. Innoviti processes over Rs. 40,000 Cr. of payment transactions, about 6% of all offline merchant payment transactions in India. This also includes Rs. 1,500 Cr. of transactions involving distribution of loans to consumers and small businesses. The most capital efficient company in this space, Innoviti processes more volume for every $ raised than any other payments company. The company is backed by marquee investors such as Catamaran Ventures, SBI Venture Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners.