From Signals to Sales: The Innoviti Technologies Journey

Early Signals: Rajeev Agrawal's Technical Roots

Rajeev Agrawal's journey began in India's premier engineering and research institutions. After earning his B.Tech. and subsequently a PhD in Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, he worked in advanced research at the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, where he contributed to low-frequency radio telescope transceiver design.

Soon after, he joined Sasken Communications, where he rose to Vice President, leading divisions in signal processing and broadband technologies.

These early experiences shaped his understanding of systems, infrastructure, and technical scale—and primed him for what came next.

The Spark: Seeing Retail Payments as Untapped Terrain

In 2002, Agrawal founded Innoviti Technologies (then focusing on enterprise payment and transaction infrastructure) with the vision to unify retail operations and payments into a coherent platform.

He observed that while retail and payments were happening in parallel, few platforms combined transaction data, merchant operations, and analytics to drive value. That became Innoviti's mission: turn payments infrastructure into a growth lever for merchants.

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Co-Founder Emerges: Amrita Malik Joins the Mission

Amrita Malik, another key figure in Innoviti's story, brings operational, product, and business-leadership expertise. According to profiles, she pursued an MBA in Marketing & Finance, then an Executive Education programme at Harvard Business School, joined Innoviti in the early years, and rose through roles—eventually becoming a co-founder or business-leader alongside Agrawal.

In interviews, Malik notes how Agrawal mentored her, teaching her how to break down complex problems into manageable pieces—a reflection of their collaborative founder dynamic.

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Building the Platform: Payment + Operations for Retail

Under Agrawal's and Malik's leadership, Innoviti developed a platform that offers merchants tools such as:

• Unified point-of-sale systems and terminals that work across cards, UPI, wallets and digital payments.
• Real-time sales data and analytics enabling brands and merchants to understand footfall, conversion and product performance.
• EMI options and financing programmes at the point of sale, turning payments into value-added services.
• An offline-first architecture for India's retail environment, where connectivity, varied payment methods and high volume are challenging.

Milestones & Growth

Some key milestones in Innoviti's journey include:

• The company was incorporated in December 2002 under the name Innoviti Technologies.
• In 2008, Innoviti worked with a major retail partner (reported to be Reliance) to roll out one of India's early cloud-based retail payment platforms, marking a pivotal shift.
• Innoviti secured licensing and regulatory approvals (such as an online Payment Aggregator licence) and expanded its offerings into EMI finance, merchant working capital and other adjacent services.
• In August 2024, Innoviti closed a Series E funding round of INR 70 crore (~US$9 million) led by Random Walk Solutions, joined by existing investors including Bessemer Venture Partners.
• According to publicly-reported metrics, Innoviti processes large transaction volume (billions of rupees annually) across tens of thousands of merchants in hundreds of cities in India.
  
  

Challenges Along the Road

Agrawal and Malik faced multiple challenges while building Innoviti:

• Early investment & capital constraints: Starting in payments infrastructure in 2002 in India required bootstrapping, long sales cycles, and convincing large retailers to adopt new technology.
• Fragmented retail environment: India's offline retail, with many small format stores, varied payment modes and legacy systems, posed integration and scale issues. Innoviti needed to build solutions that worked across formats and networks.
• Competition & regulatory risk: As payments and fintech became crowded, differentiating on data, insights and merchant growth rather than just transaction processing became key. Also, regulations around payment aggregators and EMI finance have changed over time.
• Scaling for growth: Moving from corporate large-format retail to general trade and small merchants required changes in product, pricing, support model and scale. Malik speaks about how they underestimated the diversity of merchant types initially.

Why Their Story Matters

The story of Rajeev Agrawal and Amrita Malik matters for several reasons:

• It highlights how technology infrastructure—payments and data—can be a strategic lever for retail, not just a cost centre.
• It demonstrates how two founders from very different backgrounds (research engineering + business operations) can combine to build a platform business that scales at the merchant and ecosystem level.
• Their focus on offline retail (rather than only online) addresses inclusion, unserved markets and latent customer value in emerging economies.
• It's a blueprint for Indian-fintech success: build for domestic scale, solve local problems (fragmentation, mixed payment modes), then expand.
  
  

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What's Next: The Road Ahead

For Innoviti and its founders, the near-term agenda includes:

• Scaling merchant acquisition deeper into tier-2 and tier-3 cities in India, tapping the long tail of retail stores.
• Driving product innovation: more embedded financial services at the point of sale (working capital, discounts, personalised offers), stronger analytics, more intelligent terminals and integrations.
• IPO readiness: Innoviti has publicly signalled its preparation for a public listing (IPO) as growth, scale, and profitability mature.
• Potential international opportunities: while primarily India-focused, the platform's ambition and capability could adapt to other emerging retail markets.
• Maintaining competitive edge through merchant-centric value: reducing friction in payments, turning transactions into insights and growth for brands and banks connected to the platform.
  
  

In short, Rajeev Agrawal and Amrita Malik transformed a technical, infrastructure challenge into a merchant-growth opportunity. With Innoviti Technologies, they bridged the gap between payments, retail operations and data intelligence—setting the stage for how India's commerce ecosystems can evolve. Their story is a reminder: great platforms start with deep domain insight, a founder duo with complementary strengths, and the patience to build infrastructure that works at scale.