Chennai Fintech Ebitaus Launches Ongoing Corporate KYC Platform for Lenders
Ebitaus, a Chennai-based fintech startup founded by Venkatesh Kap, has built a corporate Know Your Customer platform designed to turn business verification into an ongoing digital workflow for banks and lending institutions.
The three-year-old startup aims to address gaps in corporate lending, where verification remains dependent on scattered documents, emails, and manual checks. Its software integrates databases and application programming interfaces to establish and maintain a persistent corporate identity, monitoring ownership changes, directors, and authorised signatories across regulated institutions.
Venkatesh founded the firm after spending two decades handling corporate accounts at a private bank and managing stressed loan portfolios at a non-banking financial company. His experience showed that corporate lending vulnerabilities often stemmed from monitoring, due diligence, and siloed information across consortium lenders.
The startup's bank-agnostic platform is currently deployed with two banks, while talks are underway with more than six other lending institutions. Ebitaus targets private sector banks, new-generation banks, and NBFCs. According to the company, the system can reduce verification time to roughly 30 minutes in suitable cases and lower processing costs from about Rs 2,400 to Rs 240 per application.
Beyond domestic operations, Ebitaus has tested remote identity verification and re-KYC systems. In a proof-of-concept for a UAE bank, the platform authenticated an Emirates ID, completed facial verification and liveness checks, and facilitated virtual card issuance without requiring a branch visit.
The company operates with an in-house core team of 17 members, led on the technology side by co-founder Srinath. The firm has earned ISO certification and was initially funded by Venkatesh. It plans to seek $4 million to $5 million from private equity investors next year.
Ebitaus estimates that India generates around three crore corporate KYC transactions annually across MSMEs and large corporations. The firm aims to process 10,000 corporate transactions monthly within two years, capturing an estimated 4% to 5% of its potential market before expanding into a broader business-focused digital banking platform.
