Skydo: Building India's First Cross-Border Bank

Episode Description

🎙️New Day One podcast episode!

"We wanted to make the experience of receiving international payments exactly the same as domestic…"

This crystal-clear vision is what led Srivatsan Sridhar and Movin Jain to build Skydo, which is quietly dismantling the confusing, opaque world of cross-border payments for Indian SMBs and freelancers. Srivatsan was acutely aware of the challenges Indian exporters face with international payments from his experience running his family's automotive export business as a second-generation entrepreneur. This deep understanding of exporters' pain points became the compass guiding Skydo's product development.

Founded in 2022, Skydo has emerged as a transformative force for Indian SMBs and freelancers handling international payments. Processing $200 million in payments annually from 80 countries and serving 10,000+ businesses, they've built a platform that eliminates the opacity, delays, and excessive fees that have long plagued the industry.

Skydo is also the first company in its category to secure a cross-border payment aggregator licence from RBI. In this illuminating conversation with Mridul Arora (Partner, Elevation Capital), Srivatsan shares how building deep infrastructure before scaling has positioned Skydo to become the "cross-border operating system", while revealing how compliance-first thinking has been the cornerstone of their success.

In this episode, you will gain insights on:

> Building financial infrastructure as a competitive moat

> Creating a compliance-first culture across the organization

> The complex mechanics of international payments

> Building trust with regulators and banking partners

…and more