# Two founders built the checkout Indian software was missing
URL: https://doableclaw.com/blog/two-founders-built-the-checkout-indian-software-was-missing/
> Dodo Payments raised $1.1M to become the Merchant of Record for Indian software. The founder story: 400,000 users one co-founder could not charge.
Published: 2026-09-21

#### The short version

Dodo Payments becomes the legal seller of your software. It collects the right tax in every country and sends you the money. Rishabh Goel started it in 2023, after ten years inside cross-border money at Wise and Prodigy Finance. Ayush Agarwal came from the other side: his gaming app had 400,000 users abroad he could not charge. They raised $1.1M pre-seed in February 2025 with 1,000 merchants live. The team is now around 85 people.

## The 400,000 users he could not charge

Before Dodo, Ayush had a million users on a gaming platform called Tournafest. About 400,000 of them sat in Bangladesh, Europe and the Middle East. All of them played free, because he could not find a legal way to charge them.

Gaming is regulated differently in every one of those markets. The gateways that could reach them were fragmented, one per region, each with its own contract and its own tax treatment. A two-person team does not have the bandwidth for that. So the international half of the users stayed free while the Indian half paid the bills.

That gap is the company.

## Two people who had already lived the problem

Rishabh Goel arrived at the same wall from the opposite side of the desk.

He joined Wise in London as the first Indian non-technical hire, working directly with the company's first product manager on remittance. He then spent five years at Prodigy Finance as their first hire in India, building a cross-border education loan business out of the UK. A stint in international regulatory compliance at Solytics followed, then a year as Entrepreneur in Residence at BZAAR working on embedded fintech inside cross-border commerce.

That is close to a decade spent on one question: how does money legally move between two countries. Ayush had the same decade compressed into one painful product experience, plus a computer science degree from IIT Roorkee.

When they compared notes, the gap was obvious to both of them. Indian software was being sold globally by default, and the payment layer underneath it was built for companies with a legal entity in every market.

## The hundred conversations before the product

They did not start writing code.

They went and spoke to more than a hundred founders selling software abroad, and the same three failures came back every time. No local payment method, so the buyer in Brazil or Germany reached checkout and left. No native currency, so the price looked foreign and the card declined. No answer for regional banking compliance, so the whole thing was a legal risk nobody on the team was qualified to assess.

That pattern is what turned a personal annoyance into a company. The problem was not that payments were hard. It was that every founder was solving it alone, badly, and treating the loss as normal.

## The money: $1.1M, and who wrote the cheques

Dodo announced a $1.1M pre-seed in February 2025, led by Antler, 9Unicorns and Venture Catalysts.

The angel list is the part worth reading twice. Nitin Gupta, who built Uni Cards and ran product at PayU. Maninder Gulati, former Chief Strategy Officer at Oyo, now at Lightspeed. Preethi Kasireddy, a former partner at a16z. Nishant Verman, who ran corporate development at Flipkart. Raymond Russell, former Chief of Staff at Boom Supersonic. Five people who have each personally shipped or funded payments and global expansion, which is a different signal from five people who liked the deck.

At the announcement the company had over 1,000 merchants live across 30 countries, 25 local payment methods, checkout in 14 languages and payment success rates above 90%. Nineteen months later the headcount is around 85 and the coverage claim is 150+ countries. There has been no second round announced since.

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## What they actually built

Merchant of Record is the load-bearing idea. Dodo becomes the legal seller, which means Dodo collects the VAT in Germany and the GST in Australia, files the returns and carries the liability. The founder ships the product and never registers an entity abroad.

On top of that sits the billing layer AI companies specifically need. Credit balances that a customer buys upfront, consumes, rolls over and eventually overruns. Usage metering on API calls, tokens and compute hours in real time. A no-code checkout that collects the minimum number of fields, because every extra field is a tax on conversion.

Ayush puts the thesis in one line: "The checkout is the most underoptimized part of most SaaS products. Showing the right currency, the right payment method, and the right tax treatment for each customer's location is worth more than most A/B tests."

## The numbers that say it is working

Sign-ups crossed 10,000. Net Promoter Score sits in the 60 to 63 range, which for infrastructure is unusually high. Around a quarter of new sign-ups arrive by referral, meaning existing merchants are telling other founders about it without being asked.

There is a smaller signal too. In September 2026, Antler India ran a founder pitch event out of Dodo's Bangalore office, where one company would be selected for a $1M round. The fund that wrote Dodo's first cheque now uses Dodo's office as a place to find the next one.

## The lesson: sell the thing that blocked you

The useful part of this story is not the round size. A $1.1M pre-seed is a normal number.

It is that neither founder picked payments because payments is a big market. Ayush picked it because 400,000 of his own users were unmonetisable and he had stared at that number for months. Rishabh picked it because he had spent ten years watching money fail to cross borders at three different companies. They built the tool that had already cost them both something real, which is why they could describe the problem better than the incumbents selling into it.

## Conclusion

Before you look for a big idea, look at the invoice you cannot send, the market you cannot charge, the process you redo every month because no tool fits it. That is usually the more honest starting point.

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