Pine Labs Launches P3P: Enabling AI Agents to Conduct UPI Payments in India

Pine Labs Launches P3P: Enabling AI Agents to Conduct UPI Payments in India​

Bengaluru, June 11, 2026 – Pine Labs Limited, a leading merchant commerce platform, has announced the launch of the Pine Labs Payment Protocol (P3P). This protocol enables an Artificial Intelligence agent to complete a Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transaction without requiring human authentication, marking it as India’s first agentic payment solution built on UPI.

Pine Labs is the first payment company in India to bridge the gap between AI agency and consumer payments. The service is live in production immediately.

Addressing the Friction Point​

While UPI processes over 23 billion transactions monthly—the most widely adopted real-time payment network globally—it was fundamentally built with human users. Every traditional transaction assumed a person was present at the counter to provide approval, often through an MPIN (Mobile Personal Identification Number). This assumption creates friction when AI agents are operating on a user's behalf in agentic commerce.

P3P extends UPI’s existing mandate framework, building upon technologies like UPI One Time Mandates and Reserve Pay, to facilitate payments triggered by autonomous AI. The process allows the consumer to authorize once upfront, enabling the AI agent to subsequently browse, select, negotiate, and complete payment without interruption or human intervention.

How P3P Ensures Control and Security​

The Pine Labs Payment Protocol (P3P) provides the necessary payment and settlement rails for autonomous commerce. When integrated with Grantex, the protocol ensures comprehensive control, including verifiable identity, delegated authorization, spend limits, and auditability.

Key components of the system include:

• Authorization: Consumers authorize a single mandate upfront. The AI agent then completes the transaction based on that pre-approval.
• Standardization: HTTP 402, an open web standard for machine readable payment requests, provides a standardized protocol for discovering and requesting payments between agents.
• Consumer Control: Grantex allows the consumer to maintain absolute control, checking agent identity, enforcing predetermined spending limits, and building a full audit trail for every transaction. Consumers retain the ability to revoke or update the mandate at any time, ensuring compliance is embedded in the protocol layer.

Realizing Autonomous Wealth Creation​

P3P is already operational in specialized commercial use cases. Gullak, India's digital gold savings platform, has implemented P3P, demonstrating how autonomous commerce can transform saving habits.

A Gullak user sets a specific rule—for instance, "Buy ₹500 of gold if the price drops below ₹16,000 per gram"—and authorizes a UPI mandate once. The Gullak AI agent then monitors the market and executes the purchase automatically when the condition is met.

Manthan Shah, Co-founder of Gullak, stated that P3P shifts the paradigm from manual savings to autonomous wealth creation, providing the infrastructure required for this possibility.

Expanding Commerce Across Industries​

The deployment of P3P is underway across retail, fintech, and travel sectors. Vijay Sales, a major electronics retailer with over 150 stores nationally, is currently in active proof of concept (PoC) using P3P.

Karan Gupta, Managing Director at Vijay Sales, noted that P3P fundamentally changes the purchasing dynamic for value-conscious Indian buyers. Instead of continuously monitoring prices on their devices, customers can deploy an AI agent to secure a product the moment it meets their target price.

Pine Labs intends to extend its functionality beyond UPI, working with major card networks to integrate mandate-based authorization into card transactions, positioning P3P as the foundation for all agentic commerce in India.

Market Context and Future Growth​

The introduction of P3P aligns with the growing global trend toward agentic commerce. According to Grand View Research (2025), the global market for agentic commerce is projected to reach $65.47 billion by 2033, exhibiting a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 35.7%.

Amrish Rau, CEO of Pine Labs, highlighted that while the global market is expanding, India has led in this space due to its infrastructure. He stated: "In India, UPI's mandate framework was already architected for agentic commerce. P3P is that layer... These are new behaviours, native to how India transacts."

PINELABS Stock Price Movement​

Shares of Pine Labs Limited slipped by 3.33% in post-market activity today, closing at ₹145.14 after shedding ₹5.01 from its previous close. The stock saw intense trading throughout the day, with nearly 17.83 million shares changing hands amidst an intraday range that stretched between a low of ₹144.35 and a high of ₹151.65.