San Francisco-based payments startup Stripe, valued at $5 billion, has hired its first India employee as it looks to kick-start operations here. Anand Balaji, an ex-Amazon executive, has come on board Stripe and is currently mapping the India market for the company, sources privy to the development.

The six-year-old digital payments firm counts Visa, American Express and Sequoia Capital, among others, as its investors. It has emerged as one of the buzziest financial-tech startups globally, by offering software and services to small and medium-sized businesses to build their payments infrastructure. Founded by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, Stripe will compete with a bunch of existing payments startups in India — including Razorpay, Citrus Pay and PayU, among others — who, too, are looking to tap the fast-growing set of sellers online.

Stripe’s customers are online businesses, many of which have sellers internationally. It works with startups like Lyft, Pinterest, Slack, besides 1,00,000 other businesses, and competes directly with Paypal’s Braintree and Sweden’s Klarna, among a host of other payments enablers globally.

A Stripe spokesperson confirmed the company’s first hire in India, but did not offer any details. “We don’t comment on future plans, but India is a very exciting market and we’re blown away with the calibre of entrepreneurs we see there,” the spokesperson said.

Prior to joining Stripe, Balaji, a Wharton business school graduate, headed mobile business development at Amazon India and was part of a four-member product management team that launched the e-tailer’s website here.

Stripe typically enters a new country and stays in beta for a while as it works with testers to tailor its products to suit a particular market. Currently, it’s present in 25 countries across Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Europe.

Having a global presence, Stripe’s strong suit is that it lets businesses cater to international markets with products like Altas. Stripe’s platform allows a business to transact in as many as 130 currencies. This is where the local players will find it tough to compete with the Silicon Valley heavyweight.

“We are building a full-stack payments company from covering the biggest merchants like Amazon, Jet Airways, to smaller e-commerce startups. Due to India’s unique payment types like net-banking, United Payment Interface, and also network issues, transaction success rates become very important to e-commerce merchants. We have invested heavily in products which deliver the best success rates for our domestic market,” said Amrish Rau, MD at Citrus Payments.

Source: The Times of India