Early to UPI, still shaped like a wallet

Before UPI, sending money to a friend in India meant wallets — Paytm, MobiKwik, FreeCharge — prepaid balances behind separate KYC walls. At Mypoolin we were building Asia’s first social payments app, Venmo-shaped, and the only P2P infrastructure available was whatever APIs we could talk the incumbent wallets into exposing. We spent two years scaling on top of that, friction included: users had to load money into a wallet before they could send any of it.

Then UPI arrived, and we were among the earliest companies inside the sandbox. Early access should have been the advantage of a lifetime. It wasn’t — because the product we carried onto the new rail was designed in the wallet era. To protect our growth we inherited our own technical debt and product decisions instead of rebuilding from the ground up. PhonePe, arriving UPI-native with no past to honor, took the market at a speed we could watch but not match.

Today’s soup of agentic-protocol acronyms has the same shape. Build for where the protocol puck is going — and with current AI infra, dead weight has never been cheaper to throw away. There’s no excuse now.