India, the world’s most populous nation and the second-largest web market after China, is turning into more and more digitally energetic. Nevertheless, 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 might quantity to 0.7% of the nation’s GDP — over $14 billion — throughout the subsequent 12 months. 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 usually place a burden on companies to usually replace their tech. Efforts to eradicate digital fraud generally additionally lead to disruptions. As an example, the current clampdown on unauthorized use of the everlasting account quantity disrupted transactions for some fintech platforms.
Equal, a Hyderabad-based startup, goals to deal with 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 companies with the latter’s consent-based monetary knowledge sharing.
“Knowledge sharing continues to be a significant drawback on this nation if it’s not carried out digitally with consent,” Keshav Reddy, the son of GVK Group’s vice chairman GV Sanjay Reddy, advised TechCrunch.
Reddy based Equal with former Swiggy engineering director Rajeev Ranjan after transferring again to India from the U.S.
For over the past two years, Reddy bootstrapped Equal, and the startup has added greater than 350 prospects, 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, increase 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 traders, together with Blume Ventures, DST International, Gruhas VC, and Quona VC.
Equal is just not alone within the area, because the market already has gamers equivalent to Perfios (backed by Warburg Pincus and Academics’ Enterprise Development), IDfy (backed by TransUnion), and Bureau (backed by GMO VenturePartners). Nevertheless, Reddy advised TechCrunch that in contrast to the competitors, Equal performs the position of an aggregator and companions even with a few of its rivals.
Ravi Kumar, co-founder and CEO of Upstox, who has additionally invested in Equal’s maiden spherical and is without doubt one of the early prospects for its identification verification and account aggregator, advised TechCrunch that it’s the fee and uptime that provides the buying and selling platform a cause to not search for constructing the same tech in-house.
Upstox has been utilizing Equal for a couple of 12 months and is processing round 350,000 transactions a month. Earlier than that, Kumar mentioned, the platform was counting on current ID-verification suppliers.
“Equal has been capable of mixture throughout a slew of various APIs and ensures very excessive uptime between all these totally different connections,” he mentioned.
