Rishabh Goel
Co-Founder & CEO
Feb 25, 2025
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5
min
We’re thrilled to announce that Dodo Payments, the first Merchant of Record (MoR) platform tailored for India and emerging markets, has raised $1.1M in a pre-seed funding round.
The investment was led by Antler, 9Unicorns, and Venture Catalysts, with significant participation from angel investors including Nitin Gupta (Uni Cards and PayU), Maninder Gulati (former Oyo CSO/Lightspeed), Raymond Russell (former Chief of Staff at Boom Supersonic), Preethi Kasireddy (former Partner, a16z), and Nishant Verman (former Flipkart CorpDev head) etc.
We have a simple vision: payments should always go through, irrespective of the location of the customer or the merchant.
So how did we arrive here?
Let’s rewind back a few years.
My co-founder, Ayush Agarwal was still running his previous startup, a platform for gamers—Tournafest. While Ayush and his team spent months building a scalable product and acquiring more than 1,00,000 users, he ran into a challenge. A challenge that will later shape the vision for Dodo payments. But more on that later.
He had integrated with 2 large Indian payment gateways but soon realised that it wasn’t built to optimise global transactions. He then integrated with the largest payment processor in the world but even that didn’t solve it.
Tournafest’s users were gamers, under the age of 25. They preferred paying through alternate payment methods. Payment methods that he did not even know existed: AliPay, Pix, ApplePay, CashApp, iDEAL, GiroPay etc. The list goes on.
Moreover, even when he did manage to collect payments from a few users, managing global compliance and taxation was a logistical nightmare. In the end, Ayush was forced to limit his dreams to the domestic market.
Quick side note—For those of you who think paying taxes for International transactions is not important, check out this report.
Now, let me talk about my story.
In my latest stint before Dodo Payments, I built the cross-border BNPL product for Bzaar (cross-border eCommerce). We were working with a US payment processor for customers across the Western Hemisphere. While domestic payments were smooth - international payments were a nightmare. Low success rates, limited payment methods, and hidden fees were strongly detrimental to our international BNPL product.
When I dived into this rabbit hole, I learned that payment processors are highly regulated and regulatory bodies across jurisdictions do not talk to each other. Payment processors get licenses for each jurisdiction and even if they have licenses from different regulators - they are mandated to build rails in each jurisdiction function independently. Hence, international transactions will always be a broken experience.
I’ve been fortunate enough to work for cross-border fintech startups like Wise and Prodigy Finance early in my career. Most cross-border startups focus on solving for international bank transfers, P2P, or B2B payments, and no one was really trying to solve for a better checkout experience.
What are we doing at Dodo Payments?
Our mission is simple—we want to enable entrepreneurs and startups around the world to collect payments from all over the world. Without worrying about—payment methods, billing, invoicing, taxes, fraud, chargebacks or rather anything that takes their focus away from their product. Seems pretty straightforward enough right?
It’s 2025 now.
AI is all the rage. The number of startups popping up every year shatters the previous year’s numbers.
Developers and companies are launching products for global audiences from day 1. The time taken to build and ship products have come insanely down. And yet, processing global payments for startups from emerging markets has not improved.
What do we plan to do in the future?
With this backdrop, we’re proud to announce (again) that we’ve raised $1.1 million in pre-seed funding from Antler, 9 Unicorns, and Venture Catalysts.
With great funding comes greater responsibility. And we couldn’t be more ready.
We plan to utilize this funding to accelerate our product development, expand local processing in 30+ new markets, while enhancing compliance and security measures. Our goal is to support 100+ currencies and 300+ local payment methods across key global markets in the coming year.
So far, we’ve made significant strides—working with 1,000+ merchants from over 30 countries—and we’re setting our sights higher. By the end of 2025, we aim to onboard 10,000+ merchants globally.
Our platform already supports 25+ local payment methods, including Apple Pay, Klarna, Affirm, CashApp, UPI, and all major card networks. With this funding, we’re doubling down on our mission to simplify global payments and make cross-border transactions seamless for businesses worldwide.
This funding is just the beginning. The world is becoming more interconnected, and we’re here to ensure that every entrepreneur—no matter where they are—can accept payments globally, as easily as they do locally.
We’re just getting started.
