Every February, before Phyllo existed, Akhil Bhiwal did the same annoying dance. Log into YouTube. Export the numbers. Open Substack. Export again. Check a crypto wallet. Dig through a payout dashboard he'd half forgotten about. He was building a creative career on the side - a little video, a little writing, a little investing - and the internet paid him from a dozen disconnected corners. Come tax season, pulling it all together took not hours but weeks. He is an engineer by training, the kind of person who sees a repeated manual task and hears an alarm bell. This one wouldn't stop ringing.
The realization underneath the annoyance was bigger than his own tax return. If he - a software engineer who wrote distributed systems for a living - struggled to gather his own creator data, then every company trying to build for creators faced the same wall, multiplied by millions of users. Lenders couldn't verify a creator's income. Brands couldn't confirm an influencer was real. Apps couldn't pull a clean picture of who someone was across platforms. The data existed. It was just scattered, unverified, and locked behind hundreds of incompatible doors.
01 / THE THESISPlumbing, not paint
Bhiwal likes an analogy that fintech people understand in their bones. Before Stripe, accepting a card online meant months of integration with banks and processors. Before Plaid, connecting an app to your bank account was a nightmare. Both companies won by building the invisible layer - the rails everything else runs on. That is the exact shape of the bet he made with Phyllo.
Phyllo is a data gateway. A developer plugs in once, a creator grants permission, and the app can then read that creator's identity, engagement metrics and income - normalized into one clean format - across YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Spotify, Discord and hundreds of other sources. No scraping. No brittle one-off integrations. No begging each platform for access. The unglamorous middle layer is exactly the point. It's the sort of company most people will never hear of while quietly using products built on top of it.
02 / THE BUILDERThree companies deep
Phyllo is not a first swing. Bhiwal has been circling this problem his whole career, from different angles. He studied computer science at VIT University in India, then earned a master's in computer science at the University of Southern California, where he also worked as a graduate research assistant at the Information Sciences Institute. His first real engineering job was writing systems software inside Hewlett-Packard's R&D labs - the deep, patient work of making large distributed systems behave.
In 2016 he founded Loktra, a social-commerce platform that let companies turn ordinary people into micro-entrepreneurs and distribution channels. It won recognition, then wound down by 2019. He moved into fintech infrastructure as a product lead at Setu, one of India's API-first financial-plumbing companies, and spent time as a chief digital officer at Adani Capital. Social distribution, financial APIs, digital strategy - looked at from a distance, those aren't detours. They're the three ingredients Phyllo needed.
In 2021 he co-founded Phyllo with Achintya Gupta and Mohit Kumar. The framing they settled on - "the de-facto infra layer for the creator economy" - is deliberately unsexy and deliberately ambitious. Infrastructure companies don't win by being loved. They win by being depended on.
03 / THE RAISEWho wrote the check
In 2022 Phyllo raised a $15 million Series A led by RTP Global, with Nexus Venture Partners, Better Capital and iSeed joining. The angel list is its own tell: Sima Gandhi, who ran business development and strategy at Plaid; Pat Shah of Audible; Ankur Nagpal, founder of Teachable; and Nakul Gupta from Coinbase. People who have built financial APIs, creator platforms and crypto rails all looked at the same pitch and recognized the pattern. Around the same stretch, Phyllo climbed to the top of Product Hunt and drew a nod at the 2022 Golden Kitty Awards.
Money follows clarity. Bhiwal's whole pitch fits in a sentence, and that sentence maps cleanly onto companies investors already trust. It's a discipline you learn building infrastructure: if you can't say what layer you are and who runs on you, you probably haven't found it yet.
04 / WHY IT MATTERSIncome for a generation with no payslip
Here's the quiet stakes underneath the API talk. A growing share of people earn a living online without a traditional employer or a single pay stub. A bank looking at that person sees a blank. A brand looking at an influencer can't easily tell real reach from bought followers. Phyllo's income and identity data is the connective tissue that lets a lender underwrite a creator, a brand vet a partner, or a platform confirm someone is who they claim to be - all with the creator's own consent as the gate.
That consent piece is the part Bhiwal treats as non-negotiable. The data flows because creators permit it, normalized and verified rather than scraped. It's the difference between infrastructure that lasts and a workaround that gets shut off. He is trying to build the former: something durable enough that a decade from now, apps route creator data through it without thinking, the way they route payments through Stripe.
There's a particular kind of founder who is happiest being invisible - who would rather power a hundred products than be a hundredth as famous as any of them. Bhiwal reads like that. He joined Pavilion's CEO group and the Offline community, kept building integrations across categories, and stayed pointed at the same unglamorous horizon he set in 2021. The tax-season headache is long solved for him. The bigger version - making a creator's scattered digital life legible to any app that asks nicely - is the work of the decade.