India has spent two decades getting good at building for Indians. The bigger opportunity now is building from India for everyone else.

That shift took center stage at TechSparks 2026, YourStory’s flagship event, in a fireside chat titled ‘From early traction to global scale: Decoding cross-border commerce Manish Maheshwari, Managing Director, India, Stripe, spoke with Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory and The Bharat Project, about what it takes to turn overseas sales into lasting growth.

Sharma opened by asking where India stands in the AI race. Maheshwari was optimistic. AI, he said, is creating a new way of operating, the minimum viable company, which “can be a one-person company”. For Indian entrepreneurs, that means they “can think global and go global on day one”.

Maheshwari backed this up with examples. Emergent, a startup out of India, reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in just eight months, while Pocket FM recently crossed half a billion dollars in ARR. Stripe Data shows that the number of companies collecting money from more than 100 countries has quadrupled in five years. For businesses earning cross-border revenue, ~25% earn most of their revenue outside the top 10 markets. .

Sharma raised the worry on many founders’ minds: compliance. Maheshwari said a founder in Koramangala or Pune should focus on the core product, while a partner handles checkout, tax compliance, banking relationships, and money movement through a handful of APIs. Stripe, he said, was built around the idea of making money programmable, and “our heart beats for the founder”.

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