Tazapay

In the geography of global payments, some routes are paved and easy - a card swipe from London settling in New York, money that moves on rails perfected decades ago. Others are potholed: a merchant in Jakarta trying to get paid by a customer in Brazil, a tutoring platform in India collecting fees from students in the Gulf, a marketplace that needs to pay a thousand sellers scattered across a dozen currencies. Tazapay, founded in Singapore in 2020, built its business on the potholed routes.

The pitch is deceptively plain: let any business collect, hold, and pay out money almost anywhere in the world without opening a local company or a foreign bank account. Under that plain sentence sits a tangle of licenses, local payment connections, foreign-exchange handling, and compliance checks - the unglamorous machinery that makes a cross-border transaction feel, to the customer, like a domestic one.

Where it fits in the market

Cross-border payments is a crowded field. Airwallex, Nium, Rapyd, dLocal, and Payoneer all promise versions of global collections and payouts, and Stripe looms over the whole category. Tazapay's answer to the crowding is focus. Rather than chase the easy corridors between wealthy markets, it concentrates on emerging ones - Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East - where local payment methods are fragmented, banking is hard to access, and few competitors hold the right licenses. Coverage now spans local collection and payout rails in roughly 70 to 85 markets, layered on card acceptance in more than 173.

That focus shows up in the company's investor list, which reads like a who's-who of stablecoin finance. Ripple, Circle Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures - three names that rarely align - have all put money into Tazapay. Their shared interest is the settlement layer: the increasingly plausible future in which businesses in emerging markets move value in stablecoins and cash it out in local currency. Tazapay is building the regulated bridge between the two.

The founders and the through-line

Tazapay was started by three people who had spent their careers inside the payment industry's biggest names. Rahul Shinghal, the chief executive, worked at ICICI Bank, NETS, PayPal, and later ran revenue and growth for Stripe across Asia-Pacific. His co-founders, Saroj Mishra and Arul Kumaravel, brought operating and engineering depth from the fintech and technology sectors. The through-line in Shinghal's career - product roles at bank, network, and platform - maps almost exactly onto what Tazapay tries to be: a single layer that sits above all of them.

The company did not begin as the sprawling platform it is today. It launched in 2020 as a narrow escrow and buyer-protection tool for cross-border trade - a way for two strangers on opposite sides of a deal to trust that money would change hands only when goods did. That escrow product still exists, regulated in Singapore, but it became a doorway rather than the destination. Over the following years Tazapay added a payment gateway, multi-currency virtual accounts, payouts, no-code payment links, and, most recently, stablecoin settlement.

What you can actually do with it

For a business, the practical appeal is subtraction. A software company selling into fifteen countries would normally need local entities, bank relationships, and compliance staff in each. With Tazapay it can spin up named virtual accounts in more than 35 currencies, accept 80-plus local payment methods at checkout, and send same-day payouts to over 100 countries - through one integration. The company absorbs the FX conversion, the regulatory filings, and the fraud screening. What the customer keeps is time and, usually, a chunk of the margin that would otherwise leak into fees and failed transactions.

The customer roster reflects the industries where that leakage bites hardest: travel and ticketing (EaseMyTrip, GlobalTix, RezLive), gaming and digital goods (Eneba, LapakGaming), education (Teachmint, ApplyBoard), and consumer technology (Ultrahuman). More than 1,000 enterprises and fintechs now run on the platform across roughly 30 countries.

A rare kind of growth

Fintech has trained observers to expect growth funded by losses. Tazapay's numbers cut against that habit. The company says it has doubled revenue for three consecutive years, crossed $10 billion in annualized payment volume with growth near 300% year over year, and reached operational breakeven. Profitability at this stage is unusual enough that it functions as a competitive signal in its own right: the model pays for itself before the venture money arrives.

That venture money - a $36 million Series B capped by a Circle Ventures-led extension in March 2026, on top of a $16.9 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital Southeast Asia in 2023 - is earmarked for the next phase: more licenses (Singapore, Canada, Australia, and the US are secured, with the UAE, EU, and Hong Kong pending), expansion across Asia, Latin America, and the Americas, and a bet on what the company calls agentic payment infrastructure - rails designed for a world where AI agents, not just people, initiate payments. Whether that future arrives on schedule is an open question. The plumbing being built for it is real.