India & South Asia covers 329 providers publishing 440 APIs across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. India in particular built a globally distinctive public-API infrastructure — UPI, Aadhaar, DigiLocker — on top of a deep B2B SaaS export market.
The ratio is the first thing to notice: 329 providers, 440 APIs. Barely more than one described API per company.
Who leads
| Provider | APIs | Composite | Band |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kaleyra | 6 | 63.9 | strong |
| Digio | 6 | 63.8 | strong |
| 100ms | 12 | 61.2 | strong |
| Paymob | 18 | 60.3 | strong |
| Groww | 6 | 58.7 | strong |
| Route Mobile | 6 | 56.6 | strong |
| Reliance Jio | 4 | 55.4 | developing |
| Xflow | 18 | 53.7 | developing |
| Bharti Airtel | 5 | 53.4 | developing |
| Keka HR | 14 | 48.7 | developing |
| Cashfree Payments | 23 | 47.5 | developing |
| Tata Communications | 6 | 47.1 | developing |
No exemplars. The region’s ceiling is 63.9, and the cohort clusters in strong-to-developing.
Payments and messaging, over and over
Read the leaderboard as a sector map and it is dominated by two things. Messaging and communications — Kaleyra, Route Mobile, 100ms, Airtel, Tata Communications. And payments and financial rails — Paymob, Groww, Xflow, Cashfree, Digio.
That is not a coincidence of sampling. India’s API story is fundamentally an infrastructure story: UPI made real-time payments a public utility, and a generation of companies built businesses on top of it. Similarly, A2P messaging at Indian scale created global CPaaS exporters. Both categories force a described API, because both are integrated by third parties who will never speak to a salesperson.
What is thin by comparison is enterprise SaaS. Keka HR at 48.7 is the only HR platform in the top twelve, and the broader B2B SaaS export market — a genuinely large industry — is underrepresented in described, callable form.
The public-infrastructure gap
UPI, Aadhaar, and DigiLocker are the most interesting API systems in the region and among the most consequential anywhere. They are also the hardest to represent in a catalog like this, because access runs through regulated intermediaries rather than a public developer signup.
That structure shows up as the 329-to-440 ratio. Many companies in this region integrate national infrastructure without publishing an API of their own, so they enter the catalog as a provider with a thin surface. The integration is real; the public contract is not.
Takeaway
329 providers, 440 APIs, a ceiling of 63.9, and a leaderboard that is almost entirely payments and messaging. India and South Asia built world-class public API infrastructure and a payments ecosystem on top of it — and the enterprise SaaS layer that exports from the same region has not yet described itself to the same standard.
Browse the region at apis.io/regions/india-south-asia/.