Stripe acquires fintech startup Recko in first Indian acquisition

United States-based payments and API company Stripe on October 20 said that it has acquired Recko, its first acquisition in India. The Bengaluru-based startup is a provider of payments reconciliation software for internet businesses.

The acquisition will help Stripe expand beyond core payments acceptance and will add to their products beyond Stripe Revenue Recognition, Stripe Billing, Stripe Invoicing etc. However, the details of the deal were not revealed by the company.

Payments reconciliation is an accounting process that compares two or more sets of records—for example, a company’s internal sales log and their external bank statement—to confirm accuracy.

“Payments reconciliation shouldn’t be a mild headache that balloons into a migraine as a company grows—it should be an easy, highly automated process,” said Will Gaybrick, Stripe’s Chief Product Officer in a statement.

“Stripe helps millions of businesses around the world streamline their revenue management—from subscriptions and invoicing to revenue recognition and bookkeeping. With Recko, we’ll automate their payments reconciliation, a critical input into their overall financial health,” he added.

Recko’s team will join Stripe’s remote engineering hub, helping to build and scale Stripe’s products globally, the company said. This acquisition comes amid Stripe’s increased investment in India, including updated data locality architecture, adding payment modes and rapid local hiring.

“Joining Stripe is a perfect next chapter for Recko, and we can’t wait to help grow the GDP of the internet by removing the burden of reconciliation complexity. Internet businesses need new financial tools that can scale with their growth and automate the tasks required to produce an accurate picture of their financial health,” said Saurya Prakash Sinha, CEO and co-founder of Recko.

Recko was founded in 2017 by IIT Gandhinagar alumni Saurya Prakash Sinha and Prashant Borde and was backed by investors like Vertex Ventures and Prime Venture Partners.

The startup’s offerings help solve complexities of payments reconciliation by automating transaction data, matching individual transactions, allowing businesses to produce reconciliation reports etc. Internet businesses including Deliveroo, Meesho and PharmEasy are the startup’s customers.