Skydo Raises $10M To Build India’s Cross-Border Operating System

Skydo has raised USD 10 million in Series A funding led by Susquehanna Asia Venture Capital, with participation from existing backer Elevation Capital. The Bengaluru-headquartered cross-border payments platform serves more than 30,000 MSMEs, freelancers, and startups across 50+ Indian cities, processing payments in over 32 currencies. The company is among the first to receive the RBI’s in-principle nod as a Payment Aggregator – Cross Border (PA-CB), positioning it squarely inside the formal export payments stack.

As India chases a USD 2 trillion export target by FY30, Skydo is pitching itself as the financial “operating system” for outward-facing businesses that currently lose 3–7 percent of revenue to hidden forex mark-ups, opaque fees, and slow documentation cycles. Instead of routing every invoice through traditional banks or generic global platforms, the company enables local collections from overseas clients, zero forex markups, flat-fee pricing, 24-hour settlement, and instant generation of compliance documents such as FIRAs.

Fixing The Friction In MSME Export Payments

For small exporters, the pain points are familiar: days for money to arrive, weeks chasing paperwork, and little visibility on what was lost to spreads and charges. Skydo’s product stack is designed to attack those frictions directly. Customers can share local account details with international clients, receive payments at mid-market FX, and plug into receivables tools including invoicing, reminders, and accounting integrations.

Co-founder and CEO Srivatsan Sridhar frames the mission as building “the financial operating system for global commerce” from India, covering collections, payouts, card acceptance, compliance automation, and reconciliation. The alternative, until now, has been either bank channels with manual workflows or platforms like PayPal, Wise, and Payoneer, which are not tailored to Indian regulatory and documentation needs and can take up to 10 percent of invoice value in fees.

Customer testimonials from agencies and SaaS founders underline two themes: predictable pricing and a willingness to iterate closely with users. Exporters point to savings on FX negotiations with banks and reduced internal effort managing cash flows, alongside a sense that the product is being shaped in response to on-the-ground feedback rather than a one-size-fits-all export template.

Scaling Rails, Geography, And A Developer Layer

Skydo grew 4X over the past year and is targeting an annualised payment volume of USD 5 billion within two years. The new capital is earmarked for five fronts:

• Local collections across 20+ countries in Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East

• Regulatory licences in key foreign markets to deepen local presence

• Card infrastructure via InstaLinks, aimed at cutting card acceptance costs for exporters to roughly half of legacy gateways

• A richer compliance and reconciliation layer to lower back-office overhead for finance teams

• A developer platform of APIs and webhooks so SaaS firms, marketplaces, and fintechs can embed Skydo’s cross-border rails natively

For investors like Susquehanna Asia VC, Skydo’s timing aligns with India’s new PA-CB framework, which sets a higher bar on technology and risk management for cross-border players. The thesis is that a focused, tech-led operator can turn opacity, delays, and compliance risk into a competitively priced, high-volume B2B business. Elevation Capital, an early backer, highlights the team’s execution speed and fourfold scale-up over the last year as proof that demand exists well beyond metro-based exporters.