Knight FinTech Raises $23.6M: Building the Operating Layer for India’s Collaborative Lending Ecosystem

After a decade defined by access and digitisation, India’s lending ecosystem is entering a moment of structural change. As credit volumes scale and partnerships deepen, durability increasingly depends on how capital is distributed, monitored, and governed across institutions. Collaborative models are expanding reach, but they are also introducing operational and governance complexity that legacy processes struggle to support.

Founded in 2019 by Kushal Rastogi and Parthesh Shah, Knight FinTech has developed infrastructure that enables banks, NBFCs, and platforms to originate, distribute, and manage credit through institution grade, compliant systems. Its platform brings together co-lending, digital lending, embedded finance, and treasury operations into a single, institution-grade operating framework, focused on how capital flows through the system rather than optimising isolated functions.

Developing Connective Infrastructure for Collaborative Lending

Today, Knight FinTech operates as a core system layer for India’s collaborative lending ecosystem, working with over 85 financial institutions and enabling more than 150 live partnerships across banks, NBFCs, fintechs, DSAs, and large internet platforms. With over $5 billion of assets managed on the platform and access to nearly $50 billion of deployable capital, Knight underpins how credit is originated, distributed, funded, and governed across institutions.

At the core of this is an operating stack spanning lending, embedded finance, and treasury management. Through Knight Utopia, institutions run end-to-end co-lending, direct assignment, and digital lending workflows across origination, underwriting, escrow management, servicing, accounting, reconciliation, and regulatory reporting, while integrating with legacy CBS, LMS, and ERP systems. Knight Aurix extends this infrastructure into embedded finance, enabling internet platforms to distribute credit to consumers and SMEs by connecting them to regulated lenders through compliant, API-driven systems. Knight Beacon complements this with treasury and asset-liability management capabilities covering liquidity, funding, refinancing, and balance sheet sensitivity.

Crucially, these are interlinked systems designed around capital flow. Governance and risk intelligence are native to the infrastructure, embedded directly into transaction and balance sheet workflows, allowing institutions to scale partnerships and products without proportional increases in operational or governance complexity. In doing so, Knight positions itself as a durable system layer for institutional-scale collaboration.

Embedding Intelligence into Every Transaction

Historically, multi-partner lending relationships have relied on bespoke processes and manual coordination. While workable at smaller scales, these approaches struggle under high transaction volumes and tighter regulations. 

Knight addresses this by embedding advanced analytics-driven risk intelligence, automated underwriting, and portfolio monitoring directly into infrastructure. The emphasis shifts from managing exceptions to sustaining performance at scale, anchoring growth in governance and resilience rather than velocity alone.

Alongside this, Knight is making its operating stack smarter with AI. Built on a common data layer and API driven architecture, machine intelligence is infused directly into lending, embedded finance, and treasury workflows rather than sitting outside the system. This enables institutions to automate decisions, surface new risk signals, and remain adherent with regulations as volumes scale. By operating within digital-first processes, intelligence strengthens execution and oversight, reinforcing Knight’s role as infrastructure built for institutional scale.

Shaping the Future of India’s Credit Economy

Knight FinTech’s journey reflects the next phase of India’s lending ecosystem, where scale is earned through governance, risk discipline, and the ability to manage partnerships at institutional depth. By building infrastructure that connects banks, NBFCs, and platforms through shared systems built for institutional scale, Knight is helping shift the market from fragmented processes to system-level coordination across institutions.

We partnered with Kushal and Parthesh on the conviction that India’s credit expansion will increasingly be shaped by connective infrastructure that bridges capital and credit demand across lending, treasury, and asset liability management, with analytics embedded into every decision. That conviction has evolved into a broader thesis that the most durable financial institutions will operate on intelligent, system-level rails that make scale compatible with transparency, regulatory rigour, and balance sheet resilience. Over time, this same foundation will power autonomous intelligence embedded within infrastructure – a long-term opportunity Knight is actively developing.

Today, Knight FinTech’s $23.6 million Series A round (backed by 3one4 Capital and led by Accel with participation from IIFL and existing investors) is an important step in that direction. As Knight strengthens the operating layer for India’s lenders, its progress underscores how the country’s financial infrastructure is being built for sustained performance. 

At 3one4 Capital, we are proud to partner with Knight FinTech as it builds the rails for intelligent finance that will underpin the next decade of credit and capital formation in India.

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