india-fintech
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The Tax Return Was Only the First Clue
A conversation about one terrible tax form became an Indian filing service. Then GST arrived, and ClearTax discovered the more valuable problem was everything that happened before a return was filed.
Kush Taneja and the Education of Pocket Money
He began with a college canteen, skipped the placement queue, and helped turn pocket money into a product. The curious part is what Kush Taneja chose to teach next: not finance in a classroom, but judgment at the checkout.
PhonePe won the checkout. Now comes the harder sale.
Hundreds of millions of Indians know PhonePe as a way to pay. Its next business is selling what surrounds the payment: merchant tools, financial products and a sharper picture of where India spends.
Raj Jain Built the Rails Beneath India’s Payment Revolution
He left a software job in Los Angeles for Kolkata in 1987. The company he founded went on to help engineer UPI, bill payments and fraud systems used at national scale - and now he is trying to make those rails travel.
The Checkout Is the Product: Inside Pine Labs' Quiet Commerce Machine
Pine Labs began at the petrol pump and grew into the machinery behind a purchase - the terminal, the installment, the gift card, the gateway and, increasingly, the banking rails beneath them all.
Srinivas Sarkar
Srinivas Sarkar is the co-founder and CEO of Coupl, a Y Combinator-backed neobank built for couples in India. After a stint as a management consultant at EY and a Founder in Residence run at Entrepreneur First, he set out to fix a gap he kept noticing: banking products for couples had not kept pace with how couples actually live. Coupl offers a zero-balance digital joint account that opens in under a minute and serves married, unmarried, and LGBTQ+ partners alike. The company has grown to 80,000+ couples and 300+ crore in transactions without paid advertising. Sarkar is a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia honoree, an Entrepreneur 35 Under 35 listee, a BITS Pilani alumnus, and a three-time TEDx speaker.
Sourav Choraria
Sourav Choraria is the co-founder and CEO of Infinity (YC W24), a Bengaluru business banking platform that helps cross-border SMBs and startups send and receive international payments with multi-currency accounts, flat fees, and no FX markup. He built it with his brother Sidharth after watching their family business lose money to slow, opaque international transfers. Before Infinity he was head of growth at Paytm Money, where he helped scale the wealth platform to 20 million monthly users and launched India's first fixed-deposit-backed credit card.