How StampMyVisa Is Simplifying Cross-Border Mobility With AI

Visa processing has long remained the most outdated workflow in global travel. While flights, hotels, and even rail bookings have shifted to automated, API-first infrastructure, embassies and travel intermediaries still navigate fragmented systems, manual paperwork, and unpredictable policy changes.

StampMyVisa (SMV), an AI-driven B2B visa platform founded in 2023, believes that this industry blind spot is now the biggest barrier to seamless global mobility and the biggest opportunity for structured innovation.

The company enables OTAs, corporates, MICE operators, and travel agents to process visas for 80+ countries with a 99.5% success rate. With 60,000+ visas processed in six months, a 4X revenue growth in eight months, and customers including MakeMyTrip, EaseMyTrip, Yatra, Veena World and others, SMV is positioning itself as a new infrastructure layer for the travel industry.

In this CiOL Interaction, Rahul Borude, co-founder & CEO of StampMyVisa, shares how AI-driven document intelligence, API-driven connectivity, and human oversight are reshaping global travel operations.

Interview Excerpts

Visa processing remains one of the last major travel workflows still dependent on manual checks and fragmented offline systems. What, in your view, has prevented the industry from achieving the same API-driven standardisation that flights and hotels adopted years ago?

For years, visas have lived in a blind spot of the travel industry. They were always treated as an after-sales chore, something travel agents dealt with after selling flights, hotels, and packages. Most companies put their energy into generating bookings and improving the on-trip experience, so visas naturally became the most ignored part of the travel workflow.

That lack of focus kept the entire category stuck in the past. Flights and hotels modernised because they’re commercial industries. Competition forced them to adopt global standards and APIs. But visas sit in a completely different universe. They’re controlled by governments, shaped by politics, and governed by rules that vary not just from country to country but sometimes from consulate to consulate.

Many of these processes still depend on physical paperwork, manual checks, and legacy systems built decades ago. And unlike airlines or hotel chains, no government wants to redesign its immigration system around a shared global API. Combine that with years of industry neglect, and you get the situation we have today: massive global travel demand running on old, fragile, non-standardised government rails.

That’s why visa processing still feels slow, fragmented, and shockingly manual even when the rest of travel has gone fully digital.

With global mobility rising and embassies tightening compliance norms, how sustainable is AI-driven decision support in such a highly variable regulatory landscape where rules differ not only by country but often by consulate?

Visa rules are constantly changing, often without formal documentation. The trick is to use AI as a super-assistant rather than a judge.

AI systems must treat embassy policies as dynamic schemas, not static datasets. This means:

• Constant ingestion of new rules through RAG
• Local nuance captured via human feedback
• Escalation loops when ambiguity crosses thresholds
• Clear guardrails for compliance and audit trails

AI can handle complexity really well as long as you don’t make it responsible for final decisions.
But a human still steps in where judgement or interpretation is needed.

So we use AI to read documents, check completeness, highlight missing information, detect anomalies and guide our teams to finish the task more efficiently and in full compliance.

AI doesn’t remove complexity; it absorbs it. That’s where the value is. The sustainability lies in AI as a co-pilot, not a final authority.

SMV’s ‘Nucleus’ AI engine uses RAG and rule-based learning for document scrutiny and quality checks. From a technical standpoint, how do you mitigate the risk of model drift, hallucinations, and outdated rule sets, especially when embassy policies change without public documentation?

Nucleus is built exactly to absorb the visa rule changes that often happen quietly.

1.Always check the latest rules

Using RAG, Nucleus validates every document against the most current policy references, never old memory.

2. Version-control every change

All embassy rules are stored as versioned logic. This enables us to keep track of the changes instantly, and we also try to understand what changed and why.

3. Bring humans in when AI isn’t confident

If the system detects ambiguity, it triggers a human review. No shortcuts in compliance.

4. On-ground intelligence from India fulfilment centres

Our fulfilment centres in India give us real-time visibility into policy shifts. Their role is to have an ear to the ground to gather signals and intel on the expected changes and new requirements and confirm to the team about the changes right from the source.

This is fed directly into Nucleus, which results in our systems flagging new changes faster and with accuracy, given they are based on local intelligence gathered. This helps us stay fully aligned in real time and removes the scope of guesswork and uncertainty.

As API-based visa processing emerges as a new infrastructure layer for OTAs, corporates, and MICE operators, what are the broader implications for travel intermediaries?

APIs are basically turning visas into something you can plug in anywhere. What used to be a messy, offline task now slips right inside booking flows just like flights or hotels.

And the impact on OTAs, corporates, and agents is huge:

• OTAs can finally sell visas as simple add-ons
  
  
• Corporates get clean tracking and compliance updates
  
  
• MICE teams don’t have to deal with endless document follow-ups
  
  
• Travel agents can offer a smoother, faster service and earn more
  
  

But here’s what we’ve loved seeing the most: StampMyVisa makes agencies more ambitious.

A lot of travel agencies used to avoid selling certain destinations because the visa was “too complicated” or “too risky”. Once they plugged into SMV, that fear disappeared. Now they feel confident taking bigger bets, entering new markets, and in many cases doubling their revenue simply because the visa headache is now gone from their end.

For MICE operators, this is a total game-changer. Visa work can easily take up 60% of their time on any group trip. When SMV handles that entire layer, they get their bandwidth back, and that often translates directly into higher margins and more profitable trips.

So yes, Visa APIs are becoming the new inventory layer in travel tech. But more importantly, they’re helping travel businesses grow in ways they never thought possible.

Do you see these shifting power dynamics between embassies, visa centres, and B2B travel platforms?

Yes, but in a healthy way. Embassies still make all decisions, and that will never change. What shifts the workflow around them & makes it simple?

Instead of everything happening in physical visa centres, platforms like SMV take over the burdensome aspect of visa processing, namely quality filtering, documentation, data structuring and pre-validation.