Ask Manish Maheshwari what has changed for Indian startups with global ambitions, and his answer is speed. Speaking at the 17th edition of TechSparks, the Managing Director of Stripe India said AI is changing how quickly, and how cheaply, a company can start selling to the world.

"We are seeing the creation of a new way of operating, the minimum viable company," Maheshwari told Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory and The Bharat Project, in a fireside chat on taking startups from early traction to global scale. "The entrepreneurs in India can think global and go global on day one now." The financial infrastructure platform helps companies of all sizes manage their payments.

Maheshwari had examples ready. Emergent, he said, reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in eight months, and Pocket FM has recently crossed half a billion in ARR. "If you had asked me two years ago which companies were hitting that level of revenue that fast, I could not have told you," he said.

Stripe's own numbers point the same way. Over the past five years, Maheshwari said, the number of companies using Stripe Atlas, its incorporation and compliance service, to collect money from more than 100 countries has quadrupled. And for most businesses, over a quarter of revenue now comes from outside their top 10 markets.

Stripe , valued at $160 billion and still pre-IPO, pitches itself as the layer that takes the pain out of all this. Maheshwari said founders should not be burning engineering hours on payments plumbing.

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