Pine Labs to double down on Voice AI, agentic commerce, and cross-border payments

Gurugram-based fintech infrastructure and B2B commerce firm Pine Labs will focus on strengthening its Voice AI structure, to boost its interaction with merchants. The other two engines of growth will be expanding the agentic commerce reach and cross border payments.

“Voice AI is like a new interface grammar being written and India is a huge market for that. Merchants can ask relevant questions to interact via voice. From an increasing reach point of view this could play a big role. We will bring them into our applications too,” said Vijeth Pandit, chief product officer Pine Lab payments and Setu.

“We will identify the right kind of models which can help provide the right type of answers. This will help them ensure how to cater to business specific questions,” Pandit told Fortune India on the sidelines of the Global Fintech Fest (GFF) 2026.

Pine Labs deals with merchants both through hardware and software interactions, besides cross-selling of credit and BNPL products.

At GFF 2026, several fintechs spoke about the need, launch and opportunities for Voice AI in India. On September 11, NBFC Mahindra Finance announced an expanded Voice AI partnership with Bengaluru-based sovereign AI startup Sarvam.

As part of the broader landscape, Pine Labs is strengthening the leveraging of AI for its operational workflows, whether it be for onboarding a merchant, compliance, risk, potential frauds, charge backs, refunds, settlements and reconciliations.

Pandit also spoke about the push on credit on UPI. J&K Bank has gone live with Pine Labs for credit on UPI. Data on Pine Labs’s website shows there are 1,50,620 active credit on UPI users.

He pointed that cross border payments, where international merchants can sell to Indian consumers and merchants can accept overseas payments, will continue to be a strong growth engine. By end-2025, Pine Labs became a fully-licenced Omni channel player with a payment aggregator-cross border (PA-CB) licence.

The AI focus; GFF launches

On July 29, Pine Labs’s CEO Amrish Rau told analysts, while discussing the Q1FY27 earnings, that in “at least four divisions of Pine Labs, 90% of all new code is being written using AI.” Also in their call center and back offices, they are using AI “fairly aggressively.”

In Q1FY27, Pine Labs revenue grew 20% year-on-year to ₹737 crore with net profit increasing 4x to ₹20 crore from ₹5 crore in Q1FY26. Contribution margin was at 72.3% (Rs 533 crore) while adjusted EBITDA reached ₹126 crore (17.1% margin).

Pine Labs’s executive director, president and CBO Kush Mehra, while commenting on their strategy and next big milestone, said: “We are ahead of the curve when it comes to embracing new and emerging technologies and pursuing innovative outcomes. Be it agentic commerce or monetising the rails around UPI, we have some innovative showcases.” he told Fortune India.

Pine Labs at the GFF introduced a unique way to test their agentic commerce experience, called the “The race to checkout challenge”. This was launched together with payments technology leader Mastercard and quick commerce platform BigBasket. Here Al agents competed directly with human shoppers during limited-time flash sales of products such as iPhones and AirPods, to demonstrate the speed and effectiveness of agent-led commerce in real-world conditions.

Other launches included a Pine Labs Payments Protocol (P3P), which was India’s first agentic payment protocol on UPI and cards. The company also launched UPI Engage, which would turn UPI transactions into a revenue stream – offers, cross-sell and engagement on UPI payments.