Setu

SETU is a company with a singular mission— democratizing financial services with APIs. The founding team has been closely involved in building Aadhaar, UPI, and GSTN. Our experience in building these platforms has strengthened our conviction that Bharat needs “sachetized financial services”, or products that are—

1. Small-ticket: India is the land of the loose-cigarette and shampoo sachets. More than 90% of prepaid recharges in India are for Rs. 20 or below. Why should buying an insurance policy or getting a loan be any different?
2. Short-tenure: Often small businesses just need credit for the month. A vegetable pushcart vendor needs intraday credit (often bought at 5% interest per day!). If we make it possible for formal institutions to provide this, then it could be a 100x cheaper!
3. Flexible: Less than 10% of India is salaried. EMIs, SIPs, make sense only if you have a regular monthly income. For everyone else flexibility is the crying need. We believe the only way to achieve this is by adopting a modular API-driven technology platform, and pairing it with a developer partner-led distribution approach. We work with banks, insurance, credit and mutual fund cos to unbundle their fundamental building blocks— or “primitives”— and expose them as APIs to developers, helping them build custom financial services, thus making sachetized, contextualized finance possible. Other companies doing similar work include Stripe, Plaid, and Solarisbank.

The SETU Way — Values that we hold dear In addition to top-notch tech chops, we want to make sure you’ll be a good cultural fit. These are the shared values that form the cornerstone of our culture.

1. Empathy is a core virtue and is very highly valued at SETU. We believe that mutual trust is gained through a deep understanding of one another and this is the bedrock on which stellar teams are built.
2. Tenacity, don’t stop until the job is done.
3. Diligence, god is in the details. Embracing minutiae is an edge.
4. Pragmatic idealism, comprises of an insistence on the highest standards, while knowing how to achieve them. 5. Co-creation with the team, the business and the ecosystem.
6. Humility, with the knowledge that we are at the start of a long and exciting journey that holds a great number of unknowns.
7. Curiosity, always be learning. Whether it is technology, business or anything else.
8. Integrity, in the immortal words of Spike Lee — Do the right thing, always.