What made you confident this was the right bet when digital payments in India were still finding their footing?
When people look at today’s digital payments ecosystem, they often assume that QR codes, NFC, and mobile internet were always the obvious answers. But if you go back to 2014, when we started building ToneTag, the landscape looked very different. Smartphone penetration was still evolving, internet connectivity was inconsistent, merchants had limited access to sophisticated hardware, and digital payments had not yet become a part of everyday life.
The question we asked ourselves was “What if sound could become the world’s most securable and scalable medium for data exchange?”
Almost every phone, speaker, microphone, POS terminal, wearable, or connected device is capable of generating and receiving sound. Unlike NFC, it does not require specialized chips. Unlike QR codes, it is not dependent on cameras, perfect lighting, or visual alignment. And unlike many other technologies, it could work across existing hardware without demanding expensive infrastructure upgrades.
For us, this was never about replacing QR or competing with NFC. It was about solving a much larger problem – creating a truly interoperable proximity communication layer that could make digital transactions more accessible, scalable, and inclusive.
We believed that technology should adapt to people, not the other way around.
The country was embarking on digital transformation journeys, but its diversity demanded solutions that could accommodate every kind of merchant, consumer, and device. Urban businesses, rural merchants, feature phones, smartphones, low-connectivity environments, and multiple hardware ecosystems all had to coexist. A single technology simply wasn’t going to work.
Our conviction came from recognizing that inclusion is not achieved by introducing new hardware; it is achieved by making better use of the hardware that already exists. Sound allowed us to unlock capabilities that were sitting inside millions of devices, transforming them into secure transaction endpoints without adding complexity or cost. Pursuing this vision was far from easy.
Whenever you introduce a fundamentally new protocol, the first challenge is not technology – it is belief. We spent years investing in deep research, building proprietary acoustic communication algorithms, filing patents, and validating the technology across countless real-world environments. Every noisy marketplace, every retail counter, every transportation hub, and every edge case became part of our learning process.
We understood early that if sound was to become trusted for financial transactions, it had to be exceptionally reliable, secure, and fast. That meant solving challenges related to ambient noise, latency, device compatibility, signal integrity, and authentication. These were not problems that existing communication protocols had already solved for us. That journey demanded patience.
Many breakthrough technologies appear unconventional until the market catches up with the problem they solve. We were fortunate to have a team that believed in building for the future rather than chasing immediate trends. Over time, our conviction proved to be well-founded.
As India’s digital payments ecosystem expanded, the market increasingly valued interoperability, hardware efficiency, and scalable infrastructure. Today, digital payments are no longer limited to smartphones. Transactions happen through soundboxes, POS terminals, wearables, vehicles, kiosks, smart speakers, TVs, and a rapidly growing ecosystem of connected devices.
We built a protocol rather than a single payment product; our technology naturally evolved beyond merchant payments. The same foundational communication layer now enables conversational commerce, intelligent merchant devices, embedded banking experiences, connected vehicle payments, AI-powered financial interactions, and edge intelligence.
One of the most important lessons we learned is that enduring innovation comes from solving infrastructure problems rather than feature problems.
Features change every few years. Consumer interfaces evolve constantly. But foundational infrastructure, once established, creates value for decades. This philosophy continues to guide every decision we make.
Today, artificial intelligence is transforming financial services. Devices are becoming smarter. Payments are becoming conversational. Banking is moving closer to the edge. Machines are beginning to transact autonomously. Yet all of these innovations still require one essential capability: secure, trusted, interoperable communication between devices.
The need we identified over a decade ago has become even more relevant today. What has changed is the scale of the opportunity.
When we started, we were enabling digital payments acceptance. Today, we are enabling intelligent financial interactions between people, businesses, banks, AI systems, and connected devices. Our protocol now supports an ecosystem where payments, commerce, mobility, banking, credit, and financial services can all coexist seamlessly.
That evolution reinforces an important belief we have always held – Innovation should never be limited by today’s use cases. It should be designed for tomorrow’s possibilities.
Every device can communicate. Every merchant deserves access to digital infrastructure. Every consumer should be able to transact securely without worrying about underlying technology. If we could build a protocol that made those interactions effortless, the applications of the technology would continue to grow as the ecosystem matured.
That is exactly what has happened.
Our journey has never been about betting on sound for the sake of being different. It has been about recognizing that the future of digital finance would demand infrastructure that is inclusive, hardware-agnostic, intelligent, and capable of connecting an increasingly diverse ecosystem of devices.
Today, as the world moves towards Agentic AI, embedded finance, and voice commerce, we believe how intelligence and data move securely between devices, and how financial services become available wherever economic activity takes place.
More than a decade later, that conviction continues to shape everything we build. What began as an idea around sound has evolved into a foundational layer powering intelligent payments, connected banking, and AI-driven financial ecosystems.
