The competitive pitch is simple enough: pay what you actually owe, not what gets lost in the fog of foreign exchange markups and hidden intermediary fees. For Bengaluru-based fintech Skydo, that transparency-first approach has attracted roughly 30,000 small businesses and freelancers across India—and now, $10 million in fresh capital to export the model stateside.
Susquehanna Asia Venture Capital led the Series A round announced December 10, joined by existing backers Elevation Capital and Eximius Ventures. The investment brings Skydo's total funding to approximately $20 million since founders Srivatsan Sridhar and Movin Jain launched the platform in 2022.
It's been a steady march upward. Skydo closed a $5 million pre-Series A in August 2024, also with Elevation at the helm. Before that came a $5.2 million seed round in June 2022—Elevation again. Susquehanna's arrival marks a new name in the mix, though the consistency of Elevation's support across every funding milestone is hard to miss.
The Problem They're Solving
Skydo's target customer is the Indian exporter or freelancer who bills clients overseas and dreads the moment money actually changes hands. Traditional banking rails and legacy payment processors have long made cross-border transactions feel like a black box—opaque forex spreads, unpredictable fees, delays that stretch for days.
Skydo's counter: zero markup on currency exchange, flat fees that scale with transaction size ($19 for amounts up to $2,000, $29 for the $2,001–$10,000 bracket, 0.3% above $10,000), and settlement within 24 hours. Clients get local account details in multiple currencies, a setup designed to make receiving foreign payments feel almost domestic.
The platform now supports 32 currencies spanning more than 150 countries—a footprint that's expanded considerably since the company's early days. Both Sridhar, who put in time at McKinsey, Rupeek, and Ola, and Jain, whose resume includes stints at Barclays, InMobi, and PhonePe, came to the venture with backgrounds that straddled finance and technology.
Regulatory Green Lights and Product Expansion
Skydo recently cleared an important regulatory hurdle. In January 2026—following an in-principle nod in January 2025—the Reserve Bank of India granted final authorization for the company to operate as a Payment Aggregator handling cross-border transactions. Around the same time, Amazon Global Selling approved Skydo as a payment service provider, a designation that matters when courting sellers who move goods through the e-commerce giant's export channels.
The numbers the company reports suggest momentum, though the usual caveats about self-reported fintech metrics apply. Skydo's website currently claims to serve over 40,000 Indian exporters and to have processed more than $300 million in total transaction volume.
Those figures represent a sharp climb. Back in August 2024, the company said it had served more than 6,000 exporters with over $100 million processed since inception. By January 2025, that had jumped to more than 12,000 exporters handling upwards of $250 million annually. As of December 2025, the company was reporting service to over 30,000 MSMEs, freelancers, and startups across 50-plus Indian cities.
Skydo hasn't stood still on the product side, either. Mid-2025 brought the launch of Skydo Payouts, a feature enabling businesses to pay Indian contractors and vendors while navigating GST and TDS compliance—essentially opening a two-way corridor for money movement. A December 2024 partnership with Banking Circle added local collection in euros, pounds, and Australian dollars, plus new payment rails like Australia's BECS direct debit system.
Heading West
So what's the $10 million for? The answer, according to Business Standard's reporting on the funding announcement, is the United States. Skydo plans to flip its model and go after American small businesses that need streamlined ways to send and receive cross-border payments.
It's an audacious move, perhaps more than the founders expected when they started three years ago with a tight focus on Indian exporters. The U.S. market is crowded and competitive, dominated by established players like Wise, Payoneer, and PayPal, all of whom have spent years refining products for American SMBs.
Back home, Skydo faces domestic competition from the likes of XFlow (which has attracted backing from PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst), PayGlocal (funded by Peak XV, the entity formerly known as Sequoia India), and homegrown payment infrastructure stalwarts Razorpay and Cashfree.
The broader context suggests there's room to grow—or at least, that's what the market projections indicate. FXC Intelligence pegged the global B2B cross-border payments market at approximately $31.7 trillion in 2024, with expectations to swell toward $47.8 trillion by 2032. Whether Skydo can carve out a meaningful slice of that remains an open question.
The Transparency Gambit
What might give Skydo a fighting chance is the same thing that's powered its Indian traction: radical fee transparency in a sector where obfuscation has long been the norm. If American small businesses prove as sensitive to hidden forex markups as their Indian counterparts, the zero-markup promise could resonate.
Then again, breaking into a foreign market is rarely just about having a better product. Distribution, brand recognition, regulatory navigation in a new jurisdiction—all of those factors tend to matter as much as the underlying economics. And Skydo will be testing all of them simultaneously.
With RBI approvals secured and capital now wired, the company is making its bet. Whether the model travels as well as the founders hope is the next chapter of the story—one that will be written not in Bengaluru, but across the Pacific.
