Three years ago, as India’s digital infrastructure matured through platforms like UPI and Aadhaar, Keshav Reddy identified a critical gap in the financial system. While payments had become seamless, data access remained a bottleneck.

To address this, he founded Equal, a Hyderabad-based startup enabling secure, consent-based data sharing. The company began with personal identity verification, expanded into healthcare through the Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA), and eventually entered regulated financial data sharing as a licensed account aggregator.

“We are on a run rate of powering 1 billion transactions for 85 million Indians,” says Reddy, grandson of industrialist G.V.K. Reddy.

He invested $3 million initially in the venture and then led the next $10.5 million fundraising from a slew of investors. Rajeev Ranjan and Krishna Prasad are the co-founders of Equal. The company is governed by an advisory board led by India’s data protection law pioneer, Justice B.N. Srikrishna.

With KYC and account aggregation as its core, Equal reduces loan approval times, automates background checks, speeds up insurance claims, and supports sectors including healthcare, employment, and banking and finance.

In just three years, Keshav has scaled Equal into a platform facilitating over 100 million monthly transactions. In March 2025, the platform recorded its highest monthly volume with 101 million transactions, putting the company on a 1 billion annual transaction run rate.

Equal works with over 300 enterprise clients and has a 97% success rate in KYC processing.

In August 2024, Keshav made a strategic investment by acquiring OneMoney, an RBI NBFC-AA licence holder, which leads the account aggregator domain with a 55% market share.