Omkar Shirhatti, Gaurav Samdaria, Alok Kumar, 

As India’s banking and financial companies, both traditional and startups, ride the digital boom, a constant thorn in their side is frauds. Enter Karza, which means debt in English. Cofounded by chartered accountants Shirhatti and Samdaria in 2015, Karza’s deep tech-based solutions cover the entire lending lifecycle from verification and onboarding (TotalKYC), risk assessment and due diligence (K:Scan), monitoring (K:Watch) to recoveries (K:Lookup). While Shirhatti and Samdaria have extensive experience in fraud investigations, including during their stints at EY, Kumar brings the tech chops. He joined as a co-founder in 2017 from Morgan Stanley, where he focussed on text mining and real-time fraud detection using machine learning. Karza claims to have cut onboarding times by at least 70% and prevented about $350 million in potential fraud. Little wonder their clientele is the who’s who of the industry, including all four credit bureaus, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Paytm, GPay, Razorpay and B2B e-grocer Udaan. Karza, which has reportedly raised about $1.1 million so far, says its transaction volume and revenue rose 1.5x in 2020-21. It also claims to be profitable, even rarer than a unicorn.