Hyderabad-based identity verification startup Equal has secured $10 million (about Rs 84 crore) in its first institutional fundraising, led by Prosus Ventures, Tomales Bay Capital and its founder Keshav Reddy. After the round, the startup achieved a valuation of $80 million, the company said in a statement.Reddy, the scion of the GVK family, which runs the GVK Group, founded Equal in 2022 with Rajeev Ranjan, who was previously director of engineering at Swiggy.Equal is building a platform which helps businesses streamline their know your customer (KYC) processes and prevent fraud, thereby assisting in regulatory compliance through integration with about 50 identity databases.
Besides large institutional investors, a bunch of prominent industrialists and some other funds participated in the round.These include Blume Ventures (Founders Fund), DST Global, Quona VC, Gruhas VC, the fund run by Zerodha cofounder Nikhil Kamath, Flipkart cofounder Binny Bansal, Adani group scion Karan Adani, Cred founder Kunal Shah and Parth Jindal of JSW Cements. “Equal will be a venture funded company with a large bouquet of products. While we are serving businesses currently, there is a possibility that we will get into the consumer space as well,” Reddy told ET. The company plans to use the funds to scale up operations, build new strategic partnerships and develop a generic framework aimed at enhancing the data-sharing ecosystem in India. “We are building three major technology stacks catering to different needs of companies – one is banking and financial services, second is an employment stack and third is the consumer tech stack,” Reddy said. In August, Equal announced an investment for a strategic stake in account aggregator platform OneMoney.
While that deal is awaiting approval from the Reserve Bank of India, Equal plans to eventually get deeper into the regulated domain and seek more licences from the financial regulators. “Those plans are still at an early stage right now, but eventually we will get more regulated,” Reddy said. Equal is catering to around 350 large corporate clients such as TVS Credit, Larsen and Toubro and Upstox. The company has built a team of about 65 people, with headquarters in Hyderabad and sales presence in Bengaluru and Mumbai.
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