Equal has a plan to combat the growing cyber fraud problem in India

India, the world’s most populous country and the second largest internet market after China, is becoming increasingly digitally active. However, rapid digitalization also poses a growing risk of online fraud.

Cyber ​​fraud is growing so much in India that the Indian government estimates it could account for 0.7% of the country’s GDP – over $14 billion – within the next year. Even government-backed systems, including Aadhaar, have been attacked by malicious actors in some cases.

New Delhi continues to introduce new regulatory requirements to restrict fraudulent digital transactions. Still, these updates often place a burden on companies to regularly update their technology. Efforts to stamp out digital fraud also sometimes result in disruption. For example, the recent crackdown on unauthorized use of permanent account numbers has disrupted transactions on some fintech platforms.

Equal, a Hyderabad-based startup, aims to address all of this with its range of identity verification and financial data sharing products.

The two-year-old startup helps companies streamline know-your-customer (KYC) requirements, fraud prevention, and regulatory compliance by integrating more than 50 identity databases and thousands of API providers. The startup also recently acquired an undisclosed stake in account aggregator OneMoney to combine its identity verification services with its consent-based financial data exchange.

“Data sharing is still a big problem in this country if it is not done digitally with consent,” Keshav Reddy, son of GVK Group vice-chairman GV Sanjay Reddy, told TechCrunch.

Reddy founded Equal with former Swiggy engineering director Rajeev Ranjan after returning to India from the US

In the last two years, Reddy founded Equal and the startup has acquired more than 350 customers including State Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Reliance Jio, Airtel, Uber and Zoom.

The startup has now raised a $10 million Series A round with a post-money valuation of $80 million to scale its operations, expand product range and forge strategic partnerships. The round was led by Prosus Ventures along with Tomales Bay Capital and Reddy himself and saw participation from other investors including Blume Ventures, DST Global, Gruhas VC and Quona VC.

Equal is not alone in this space, as there are already players in the market such as Perfios (backed by Warburg Pincus and Teachers’ Venture Growth), IDfy (backed by TransUnion), and Bureau (backed by GMO VenturePartners). However, Reddy told TechCrunch that unlike the competition, Equal plays the role of an aggregator and even works with some of its competitors.

Upstox co-founder and CEO Ravi Kumar, who also invested in Equal’s first round and is one of the early customers for its identity verification and account aggregator, told TechCrunch that it was the trading platform’s cost and uptime that gave it a reason to do so give, not to do this, look for ways to develop similar technology in-house.

Upstox has been using Equal for about a year and processes around 350,000 transactions per month. Previously, Kumar said, the platform relied on existing providers for ID verification.

“Equal has been able to aggregate a variety of different APIs and ensure very high availability between all of these different connections,” he said.