Our Story
The transaction layer
India never built.
100,000 boutique retailers. Billions of dollars of inventory. Zero formal credit infrastructure. We are building the layer that changes that.
The problem
The data layer does not exist.
India has over a hundred thousand boutique retailers collectively moving billions of dollars of inventory every year. No formal credit infrastructure exists for them. Traditional lenders cannot underwrite these businesses because the formal signals they rely on have been made useless. GST filings, ITR returns, bank statements. Retailers deliberately understate all of it. Black money is structural, not exceptional. The result is that retailers operate entirely on informal credit from distributors at exploitative terms.
Brands, meanwhile, cannot access offline distribution without going through middlemen who take 40 to 50 percent margins. The boutique channel is enormous and almost entirely inaccessible. Not because the demand is not there. Because the infrastructure is not there.
Nobody has built the data layer that would make these retailers legible to formal capital. Building it requires being inside the transaction layer first. That is what we are building.
What is a Serai?
A serai was the great marketplace of the ancient trade routes. Merchants gathered under one roof. Spice traders from Kerala, weavers from Varanasi, perfumers from Lucknow. The serai was not just a place of commerce. It was a place of trust. Of curation. Of connection between makers and the people who carried their work into the world.
We chose this name deliberately. Because we believe India's founders deserve exactly that kind of marketplace. One where the best brands find the right stores. Not through cold calls and WhatsApp chaos. But through something built with the same intention as those ancient caravanserais. Bringing the best together, and making trade feel dignified again.
The business
The marketplace is not the business.
It is how we build it.
Serai is building the transaction layer. A curated wholesale marketplace where brands get paid in 7 days and retailers get Net-30 terms, with Serai carrying the working capital float. Every order that moves through the platform generates signals that no bank or lender can access anywhere else.
Reorder frequency. Payment velocity. Basket composition. Which categories a retailer doubles down on and which they drop. When they pay early and when they push to the limit. These behavioral signals predict creditworthiness far more accurately than the formal financial signals that retailers deliberately corrupt. No bank has this data. No lender can build it without first building what we are building: the trust and transaction layer on both sides of the market.
The long-term business is embedded retailer credit at 18 to 24 percent per annum against order history. Underwriting businesses that traditional financial institutions cannot touch. The marketplace funds the operation and seeds the data. The credit product is what compounds.
Where this began
Two brothers from Punjab.
We grew up watching our family build businesses the hard way. Relationships built over years. Trust earned slowly. Distribution won store by store, city by city, through sheer persistence.
When we started talking to D2C founders across India we heard the same story everywhere. A skincare brand with fifty thousand loyal customers online but only three offline stores. A wellness brand with a waiting list but no way to reach the boutiques actively looking for exactly what they made. The problem was never the product. It was always the bridge.
Faire solved this in the United States and built a multi-billion dollar company doing it. We looked at India and saw the same problem, a much larger informal credit opportunity underneath it, and nobody building either. So we decided to build both.
The Founders
Uday Batra
Founder and CEO, Cornell University
Uday studies Applied Economics and Management at Cornell. He started Serai after spending months speaking with D2C founders across India and hearing the same frustration in every conversation. Getting into offline retail was broken, manual, and exhausting. He is building Serai to be the platform he wished existed when he started asking those questions.
Rajvir Batra
Co-Founder, Harvard University
Rajvir graduated from Harvard and brings operational and strategic depth to Serai. Having grown up watching Indian retail from the inside, he understands the trust dynamics between brands and buyers and what it takes to build something that earns lasting loyalty on both sides of a transaction. Together the Batra brothers are building the distribution and credit infrastructure that India's boutique economy has always needed.
Launching October 1st.
We are inviting a small group of brands and retailers to shape what Serai becomes. Applications are open now.