How Knight Fintech is connecting banks with underserved borrowers

India's financial sector has evolved rapidly over the past decade, driven by regulatory reforms and technology. In 2020, the Reserve Bank of India's co-lending guidelines enabled banks and NBFCs to collaborate formally. This opened up a new market opportunity, but the infrastructure to connect them didn't exist.

Kushal Rastogi, who built AI-driven trading systems at QuantMagnum Technologies and worked with funds like Empire Capital and Salus Alpha Capital, and Parthesh Shah, who brought financial services expertise from Bloomberg Singapore and Deloitte Consulting, saw the gap clearly. Banks had capital but limited reach, while NBFCs and fintechs had customers but lacked funds.

"Many smaller banks had idle capital, with nearly a third parked in low-yield investments earning just 6–7%," Rastogi says. "Meanwhile, NBFCs and fintechs had borrowers ready but no money to lend."

They realised the industry needed more than a bridge; it needed a digital infrastructure to seamlessly connect banks, NBFCs, financial institutions, and internet platforms. The duo founded Knight FinTech in Mumbai in 2019. Rastogi serves as the Founder, CEO, and CTO, while Shah is the Co-founder and Chief Business Officer (CBO).

The banking technology company builds full-stack solutions for co-lending, digital lending, and treasury management using cloud-based, API-driven technology to help banks, NBFCs, and fintechs collaborate.

How does it work?

Knight Fintech has built three platforms to address gaps in India's financial services sector.

Knight Beacon supports banks and NBFCs in managing treasury operations by providing real-time market analysis and compliance tracking, replacing manual spreadsheet-based workflows.

Knight Utopia enables co-lending partnerships between banks and NBFCs by connecting their systems and synchronising the loan lifecycle across multiple loan types, home, property, gold, vehicle, education, and personal loans, as well as supply chain finance.

Knight Aurix, launched in 2024, provides customer-facing lending through a mobile app, AI-powered WhatsApp services, and a credit line on UPI. The platform uses AI to analyse transaction patterns and generate credit scores by incorporating income, assets, and spending behaviour.

According to Knight Fintech, the system assesses repayment likelihood and can flag early warning signs of missed payments. Optical Character Recognition is used to extract data from documents, KYC papers, and income proof for underwriting.

After matching, the system handles onboarding, identity verification, approvals, disbursements, repayment tracking, and credit bureau reporting across 150 partnerships. "We've built the platform on a microservices architecture prioritising low latency, high scalability, and high availability. In banking, there's no room for downtime," Rastogi says.

For data security, the system operates within partner institutions' premises. Models run on the institutions' infrastructure, partners obtain customer consent, and only encrypted data moves through the system. The company doesn't handle personally identifiable information directly.

Impact and clients

Knight Fintech now supports 85 financial institutions, and has partnered with nine out of 12 public sector banks and 15 of India's largest banks. Some of its notable clients include NABARD and ICICI Securities. The startup competes with companies such as nCino and Thought Machine, but differentiates itself through its deep integration with India's banking ecosystem.

The platform can process more than 500 different credit approval rules simultaneously. "Each lender has specific requirements: one bank might approve home loans for salaried employees with a 700-credit score, while another prefers self-employed borrowers with collateral," Rastogi explains. The system checks applications against these rules and routes them automatically.

In co-lending arrangements where two institutions share a loan, the platform mediates between systems that cannot communicate directly. It calculates each lender's payment share, manages overdue classifications, and keeps bureau reporting consistent.

The platform maintains SOC certification for cloud infrastructure, VAPT (Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing), ISO for international standards, and CMMI for process maturity.

Knight Fintech operates as a technology provider between regulated banks and NBFCs. "We don't handle payments; we integrate with payment aggregators, escrows, and core banking APIs as a licensed software layer," says Rastogi.

Funding and future

Today, Knight Fintech manages an active loan book, with monthly disbursements of Rs 3,000-4,000 crore. "Banks typically earn 5-7% on treasury assets," Rastogi notes. "Through our platform, they can deploy the same capital into retail or MSME lending at 10-15%."

"We've disbursed $7 billion in loans as of September 2025," Rastogi says. "By March, we expect to touch $10 billion mark, and we're targeting $50 billion in four to five years."

Knight Fintech is capitalising on India's embedded finance boom, a sector valued at $5.75 billion in 2024 and projected to reach $28.6 billion by 2029, growing at 37.8% CAGR, according to a Business Wire report. The platform earns revenue through software licensing fees, implementation costs, and ongoing fees based on assets under management, with a team of over 350 professionals.

The company has raised over $20 million across four rounds. Prime Venture Partners led the seed round, followed by a pre-Series A from 3one4 Capital and Commerce VC in August 2021. Accel Partners led the Series A in February 2024 and Series A+ in April 2025.

Over the next two years, the company plans to expand its product suite in embedded finance, followed by credit lines on UPI alongside continued growth in digital lending, co-lending, and treasury operations.

The company is also eyeing international markets, with a focus on the Middle East to start with and parallel expansion planned in the Asia-Pacific. The broader vision is to become India's leading digital lending infrastructure platform with global reach over the next five to seven years.

(The article has been updated)