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India, the world’s most populous nation and the second-largest web market after China, is changing into more and more digitally lively. Nonetheless, this speedy digitization comes with a rising danger of on-line fraud.
Cyber fraud is mounting in India to the purpose the place the Indian authorities estimates it may quantity to 0.7% of the nation’s GDP — over $14 billion — inside the subsequent yr. Even the government-backed programs, together with Aadhaar, have been focused by dangerous actors in some circumstances.
New Delhi retains introducing new regulatory necessities to restrict fraudulent digital transactions. Nonetheless, these updates typically place a burden on companies to commonly replace their tech. Efforts to eradicate digital fraud generally additionally lead to disruptions. As an example, the latest clampdown on unauthorized use of the everlasting account quantity disrupted transactions for some fintech platforms.
Equal, a Hyderabad-based startup, goals to handle all this with its suite of identification verification and monetary data-sharing merchandise.
The 2-year-old startup helps companies streamline know-your-customer (KYC) necessities, fraud prevention, and regulatory compliance by integrating greater than 50 identification databases and 1000’s of API suppliers. The startup additionally lately acquired an undisclosed stake in account aggregator OneMoney to mix its identification verification providers with the latter’s consent-based monetary knowledge sharing.
“Knowledge sharing remains to be a serious downside on this nation if it’s not achieved digitally with consent,” Keshav Reddy, the son of GVK Group’s vice chairman GV Sanjay Reddy, informed TechCrunch.
Reddy based Equal with former Swiggy engineering director Rajeev Ranjan after transferring again to India from the U.S.
For during the last two years, Reddy bootstrapped Equal, and the startup has added greater than 350 clients, together with State Financial institution of India, HDFC Financial institution, ICICI Financial institution, Reliance Jio, Airtel, Uber, and Zoom.
The startup has now raised a Sequence A spherical of $10 million at a post-money valuation of $80 million to scale its operations, develop the product suite, and forge strategic partnerships. The spherical was led by Prosus Ventures, together with Tomales Bay Capital and Reddy himself, and noticed participation from different buyers, together with Blume Ventures, DST International, Gruhas VC, and Quona VC.
Equal isn’t alone within the area, because the market already has gamers resembling Perfios (backed by Warburg Pincus and Lecturers’ Enterprise Progress), IDfy (backed by TransUnion), and Bureau (backed by GMO VenturePartners). Nonetheless, Reddy informed TechCrunch that in contrast to the competitors, Equal performs the function of an aggregator and companions even with a few of its opponents.
Ravi Kumar, co-founder and CEO of Upstox, who has additionally invested in Equal’s maiden spherical and is likely one of the early clients for its identification verification and account aggregator, informed TechCrunch that it’s the price and uptime that offers the buying and selling platform a motive to not search for constructing an analogous tech in-house.
Upstox has been utilizing Equal for a few yr and is processing round 350,000 transactions a month. Earlier than that, Kumar stated, the platform was counting on current ID-verification suppliers.
“Equal has been in a position to combination throughout a slew of various APIs and ensures very excessive uptime between all these totally different connections,” he stated.
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