Pine Labs has announced the launch of the Pine Labs Payment Protocol (P3P).
For the first time in India, an AI agent can now complete a UPI payment without human authentication. The protocol is live in production today.
UPI has grown to process over 23 billion transactions a month, making it the most widely adopted real-time payment network in the world. However, the infrastructure was built for humans, with every transaction requiring a person to approve at the other end. In agentic commerce, where AI acts on a user’s behalf, every agent reaching checkout has faced the same barrier: a human authentication step and an MPIN designed for humans, not machines. The transaction fails and the commerce journey stops. Until now, no payment company in India had addressed this gap.
Pine Labs has built P3P by extending UPI’s existing mandate framework, already proven through UPI One Time Mandates and Reserve Pay, into payments triggered by AI agents. The consumer authorises once, upfront. After that, the agent browses, selects, negotiates, and pays with no human authentication, no interruption, and no friction.
P3P works alongside two key components. Grantex provides verifiable identity, delegated authorisation, spend controls, and auditability. HTTP 402, an open web standard for machine-readable payment requests, provides a standardised protocol for discovering and requesting payment. Together, the three layers enable trusted, secure, and auditable agent-to-agent transactions on behalf of merchants without requiring human intervention. The consumer retains full control at all times, with the ability to check agent identity, enforce pre-approved spending limits, and revoke or update the mandate at any moment. Compliance has been built into the protocol layer itself.
Gullak, India’s leading digital gold savings platform, has gone live on P3P. A Gullak user sets a simple rule such as buying Rs 500 of gold if the price drops below Rs 16,000 per gram, approves a UPI mandate once, and the AI agent handles the rest. The consumer receives a confirmation, not a request for permission.
Manthan Shah, Co-founder, Gullak remarked, “Gold is deeply cultural, but timing the market takes attention most people simply don’t have. With P3P, we are moving from manual savings to autonomous wealth creation. Pine Labs has built the infrastructure to make this possible.”
Vijay Sales, one of India’s most trusted electronics retail chains with over 150 stores nationwide, has entered an active proof of concept with P3P. Deployments are also underway across retail, fintech, travel, and other sectors, with further partner announcements to follow.
Karan Gupta, Managing Director, Vijay Sales said, “Electronics buyers in India are highly value-conscious — they are always waiting for the right deal or the right price drop. P3P fundamentally alters this dynamic. Instead of a customer constantly checking back for discounts on a smartphone or refrigerator, they can now deploy an AI agent to secure that product the moment it hits their target price. It’s like giving every customer a personal shopper who never misses a deal.”
The global agentic commerce market is projected to reach $65.47 billion by 2033, growing at a CAGR of 35.7% (Grand View Research, 2025). With a rising UPI user base and P3P now live, India has placed itself at the centre of that growth. Pine Labs has anchored P3P onto UPI’s Single Block Multiple Debit and One Time Mandate frameworks, infrastructure already built for block-now, debit-on-event commerce with near-instant settlement.
Amrish Rau, CEO, Pine Labs said, “We have always built by asking what existing infrastructure already makes possible, then building the layer that was missing. In India, UPI’s mandate framework was already architected for agentic commerce. P3P is that layer. An agent securing a flash sale the moment it goes live. A down payment locked in before inventory disappears. A savings trigger at the right price. These are new behaviours, native to how India transacts. Pine Labs is building the commerce infrastructure for that world. Not catching up to anyone. Building ahead.”
P3P is live on UPI today and Pine Labs has begun working with major card networks to extend P3P’s mandate-based authorisation to card transactions, with the goal of making the Pine Labs Payment Protocol the payment foundation for all agentic commerce in India.
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