GVK’s Keshav Reddy Bets Big On India’s Digital Public Infrastructure With ID Platform Equal

~ 1 million Indians already using Equal; vision to scale up to 100 million Indians

~ Over 50 renowned personalities from entertainment, business, and sports, including Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan, SS Rajamouli ,Jr. N.T.R., Kiara Advani, Harsh Jain, Co-founder of Dream Sports, Kunal Bahl, Co-Founder of Titan Capital, Jay Kotak, VP of Kotak811, Sania Mirza and PV Sindhu show support and excitement for Equal

On the occasion of Independence Day, GVK’s Keshav Reddy and his co-founder, Rajeev Ranjan, announced Equal, a consent-first and privacy-focussed platform, for Indians to securely and seamlessly share IDs with one-click. Equal is built in partnership with India Stack (India’s advanced public digital infrastructure) and DigiLocker.

With ~1 million users already using it in beta, Equal’s aim is to empower 100 million Indians across diverse use-cases including hotel and co-working space check-ins, real estate transactions, employee verifications, loan verifications, housing finance verification, insurance claim verification, hospital check-ins, vehicle purchase, agriculture related on-boarding and digital account on-boarding. Equal’s aspiration is to impact lives across diverse cohorts spanning white collar to blue collar workers, farmers, borrowers and consumers, helping them better manage their personal identification documents.

Equal provides a secure and consent-first environment on its platform for users to store, manage, and share government ID and other records including PAN, driver's licenses, health and financial records, and more.

“The philosophy behind Equal revolves around addressing the identity pain points experienced by the vast population of 100 million Indians on a daily basis to access places and opportunities. Documents are scattered across bedside drawers, photo libraries, instant messaging apps and cloud drives. Equal’s goal, therefore, is to allow users to securely and seamlessly share their identities wherever and whenever required, through a unified front, with complete control in their hands. We see it as a revolution in how India perceives and manages personal identification, while being considered a gold-standard in data-privacy security,” said Keshav Reddy, founder, Equal.

On the launch day, Equal received support from 50 renowned personalities across business, entertainment, and sports. From the world of cinema, Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan, SS Rajamouli, Jr. N.T.R., Varun Dhawan, Kiara Advani, Shahid Kapoor, Allu Arjun, Rana Dagubati, Sonam Kapoor Ahuja, Samantha Prabhu, Tamanah Bhatia, Neena Gupta and Raveena Tandon took to social media to share their good wishes and excitement to join the waitlist. From the startup world, a unicorn founder Harsh Jain, Co-founder of Dream Sports; Jay Kotak, VP of Kotak811, Kunal Bahl, Co-Founder of Titan Capital and Anshu Sharma,  Co-founder & CEO Skyflow - Data Privacy Vault whereas from sports Sania Mirza and PV Sindhu, publicly expressed their support to the platform.

Equal has announced the waitlist on its website www.equal.in, allowing users to be among the first to experience the platform.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

About Keshav Reddy

Keshav Reddy comes from a lineage of successful entrepreneurs and business pioneers who have served millions of Indians over the years. Keshav’s purpose too, as founder of Equal, is to empower 100 Million Indians to address their identity pain points, thereby allowing them better access to places and opportunities.

Keshav is also a board member of Reddy Ventures (www.reddy.co.in), which is a family office where he led investments in 30+ high-growth technology companies, of which five achieved Unicorn Status (Cred, Upstox, Hive, Genies & Chipper Cash). Keshav is also board member on India’s second largest pharma contract research organisation, Aragen Life Sciences (www.aragen.com) and India’s largest healthcare foundation, GVK EMRI (www.emri.in).

Prior to becoming an entrepreneur and investor, Keshav served in capacity of Vice President at GVK Airports, India’s leading airport operator at the time, where he managed commercial revenues of ~$150 mn dollars whilst also playing a key role in stake sales of the airport business worth ~$1 billion.

Keshav holds an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

About Rajeev Ranjan

Rajeev previously served as Director of Engineering at Swiggy, where he led the revenue and growth spanning different categories. Rajeev has also spent close to a decade at Amazon where he worked in different capacities, growing to a Senior Tech Leader and served as Technical Advisor to the CTO – India Payments. He led the Amazon Retail Core Security platform focusing on privacy and end to end security of customer data, and managed the core team that built and executed RBI compliant payment platform, popularly known as Amazon Pay and Amazon Gift Card. Rajeev holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from the esteemed institute of BIT Mesra.

Equal’s security measures

Equal stores all personal identifiable information and data in a data vault, and uses tokenization to enable further level of security. To ensure utmost protection, military-grade encryption is implemented, safeguarding the information from unauthorized access. It uses 256 bit secure socket layer (SSL) encryption for the information transmitted during any activity. This advanced encryption protocol ensures that data remains secure during its transfer. Tokenisation is implemented so that, despite the security of the vault, in an unlikely event of cybercriminals being able to access the secure vault, the information and data is rendered useless. Equal, in that sense, uses the same level of security as any reputable bank or credit card company. Equal’s also complies with the various security-related mandates such as ISO27001, SOC II, amongst many others. It further ensures all security measures undergo rigorous testing by independent agencies.