Today's Edition
A. SREENIVASA REDDY (ABU DHABI)
Juspay, the Bengaluru-based payments technology company which commenced operations in February in the UAE, has onboarded “several big names” despite the recent disruptions.
Nakul Kothari, head of Middle East & APAC, in an interview with Aletihad, said Juspay is working with more than 10 clients and would reveal the “big names” soon after completing the necessary legal formalities.
“We primarily work with enterprise-size merchants who process billions of dollars in volume, rather than small businesses, which explains why the number of clients may not sound exciting,” Kothari said.
Juspay is known for its “payment orchestration”, the unified infrastructure layer that sits between the merchant and the entire ecosystem of payments. “This solution helps merchants avoid expensive, slow, and unreliable manual integrations by allowing them to use a single API to manage and optimise all their payments,” Kothari said.
The company, which operates as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, acts purely as a technology layer and does not handle funds or settlement processes. “It follows a regulation-first approach, ensuring that all its products are aligned with local market rules and compliance requirements,” Kothari said.
While Juspay stores transaction-related data, it emphasises strict data localisation controls and minimises exposure to sensitive information by compartmentalising data and relying heavily on network tokenisation, thereby avoiding the storage of raw card details, Kothari said.
The company recently completed a Series D funding round, taking its valuation to about $1.2 billion, as it looks to expand its footprint in international markets, including the GCC.
Kothari said Juspay is leveraging more than 13 years of experience in building payment infrastructure at scale in complex markets such as India, positioning itself to address similar challenges in the Middle East.
In the UAE and wider GCC region, the company is focusing on large enterprise clients, particularly in sectors such as travel and e-commerce, where payment systems involve multiple markets, currencies and service providers.
The broader opportunity remains significant, with the Middle East e-commerce market estimated at around $40 billion and expanding steadily, driven largely by cross-border transactions.
Juspay also indicated that it is open to working with cryptocurrencies and stablecoins, but only within regulatory frameworks. In markets such as the UAE, where such instruments are permitted in specific use cases, the company can support merchants if regulations allow.
Looking ahead, the company is investing in artificial intelligence to future-proof its infrastructure, anticipating that the rise of agent-driven commerce will reshape checkout experiences and require secure systems capable of handling transactions initiated by AI agents.
Globally, Juspay processes more than 300 million transactions daily, with an annualised total payment volume exceeding $1 trillion, and serves over 500 enterprise merchants and banks with a reliability rate of 99.999%, supported by a team of more than 1,500 payment specialists.
