For three decades, ‘Built in India’ has meant something specific in global financial services. It meant the back office. It meant the call centre. It meant the offshore team that maintained the code someone else had written. That meaning is beginning to shift. When NPCI International signed UPI licensing agreements with partners in Singapore, France, Sri Lanka, and the UAE, it marked something larger than a payments solution. It signalled that India had become an exporter of financial infrastructure rather than a consumer of it. The Account Aggregator framework is being studied by global central banks. The new generation of infrastructure products from fintech companies is selling its own software, designed in its own offices across the globe.
Biz2X is an AI-led lending technology company offering a full-stack platform designed in India, owned by Indian engineering teams, and sold to lenders globally. Biz2X did not start as a software company. It began as the internal technology stack that powered Biz2Credit’s own US lending operations. Biz2Credit is the lending and finance brand with which the company started. Founded in 2007 as a fully digital, branchless lender to American small businesses, it originates roughly $1.5-2 billion in new loans every year. It has funded more than $16 billion cumulatively to over 225,000 US businesses since its inception. As demand from banks and NBFCs to license the underlying technology grew, the company productised the platform in 2017 and launched Biz2X as a standalone brand.
Rohit Arora and his brother Ramit founded Biz2Credit in New York in 2007. Both were trained as financial engineers. Ramit Arora, President & Co-Founder, Biz2X and Biz2Credit stated, “We began with a clear mission to close the global MSME credit gap, one of the most critical barriers to inclusive economic growth. While small businesses remain the engine of job creation and innovation, access to timely credit continues to be a challenge at scale”. Meanwhile, American banks, hit by the financial crisis, were pulling credit lines from small businesses. Conventional wisdom said a downturn was the wrong time to start a business. The brothers took the opposite view: a credit gap was opening up at exactly the moment when no one else was willing to fill it.
The marketplace they built first matched SMEs with lenders. It worked, but exposed a flaw: the lenders behind the platform took 30 to 90 days to approve or reject borrowers. The user experience was broken. The opportunity, as they saw it, was to become the lender themselves, digitally, without a branch network, with technology doing the work that physical infrastructure does for a traditional bank. A Series A investment from Nexus Venture Partners in 2011 funded the pivot. Eleven million dollars was not enough to build a US bricks-and-mortar operation anyway. It was, however, enough to seed a serious engineering operation in India, and to start building the underwriting models, capital-markets relationships, and collections systems that a digital lender needs to survive.
Vineet Tyagi, Global Chief Technology Officer at Biz2Credit and Biz2X, said: “The challenge was not the lending itself. Giving money is the easiest part; collecting it back is the hardest part.” The founders’ insight was that small-business defaults are rarely intentional. They are symptoms of cash-flow stress. Understanding that distinction was the difference between aggressive recovery and supportive restructuring, and over time it became the core of how the company built its underwriting, its scoring models, and eventually the BizAnalyzer Score.
The India bet has now compounded for 15 years. “We are more GCC-plus than GCC,” Tyagi says, explaining that India is not inheriting work designed in New York but originating it. “We don’t have engineers in the US office,” adds Tyagi. “The reason I sit here is because this is where the product is built. Doing it from somewhere else doesn’t make sense.” The Noida office has 450 technology staff and 200 operations personnel. The Pune office adds about 70 more engineers, plus product staff. They run Biz2X on AWS and GCP data centres deployed across continents, monitored from India 24 hours a day.
Biz2X’s Indian customer base is broad. The platform sits behind a mix of large private-sector lenders, public-sector institutions, and NBFCs operating across MSME credit, supply-chain financing, and priority-sector lending. The product types running on the platform range from working-capital loans for individual small businesses to large anchor-driven financing programmes that serve thousands of downstream suppliers through a single contract. The Indian numbers alone make the scale visible. Biz2X enabled approximately Rs14,000 crore of MSME disbursements in FY24-25. The target for this year is Rs17,000 crore. The company has also built a digital site-verification system, combining GPS tagging, machine vision, and Aadhaar-anchored identity matching, for partners working with the Udyam Aadhaar database of 7.2 crore registered Indian SMEs, where, by the company’s account, roughly half the data is stale or unvalidated.
Our biggest competitive edge is the depth of historical performance data accumulated over nearly two decades, across multiple credit cycles
The international customer base reflects three distinct phases of the company’s expansion. In the United States, embedded-finance partnerships with large healthcare and payroll-services platforms are taking lending into provider networks and payroll cycles, building credit decisions on operational data from inside the workflows where capital is actually needed. In the Middle East, the platform powers both digital-first lenders and established banks, including conventional and Islamic institutions in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, adapting to open-banking and Vision 2030-driven digitisation. The next leg of expansion, currently being scoped with multilateral institutions, is into other emerging markets, taking the same India-engineered infrastructure into geographies where SME credit gaps remain structurally large.
The AI bet
Biz2X’s claim to differentiation rests on machine learning (ML) that predates the current AI wave by nearly a decade. “We have been using machine learning since 2014,” says Vineet Tyagi. “This is not something we started when generative AI became the topic of conversation in 2022.”
The company has had 18 years to accumulate the data. Across Biz2Credit’s US lending operations alone, the platform now sits on vast sets of historical lending data, covering originations, repayments, restructurings, and defaults across multiple economic environments, including the 2008 financial crisis, the Covid-19 shock, and the current high-rate cycle. Add in activity from the global Biz2X platform, more than $32 billion in disbursements and $135 billion in applications evaluated, and the dataset on which Biz2X’s models train is genuinely difficult for any newer entrant to replicate.
“Our biggest competitive edge is the depth of historical performance data accumulated over nearly two decades, across multiple credit cycles,” says Rohit Arora, Co-Founder & CEO, Biz2X & Biz2Credit. “Effective credit models require not just data but experience through both favourable and challenging market conditions. Proprietary data, technology maturity, and trusted relationships on both sides of the marketplace create significant barriers to entry.”
India can become a global leader in building AI-powered platform businesses
The second advantage, and the one less often discussed, is engineering depth. The India operation includes specialised AI, machine-learning, and data-engineering sub-teams that have been built up over more than a decade. For a company training proprietary scoring models against a proprietary dataset of this scale, that kind of long-tenured engineering bench matters more than chasing newly minted AI talent. “India offers exceptional engineering talent and a strong digital ecosystem,” Arora says. “Centralising technology teams in India enables efficient product development, data analytics, and innovation. India can become a global leader in building AI-powered platform businesses.”
The resulting product is the BizAnalyzer Score (also called the BA Score), a patent-filed credit-rating engine that takes bank-statement data, sectoral signals, and macroeconomic indicators and produces a 0-100 risk score for any small business on the platform. For Arora, AI is not a feature roadmap. It is repositioning. “Biz2X’s vision is to become an AI-first platform company by embedding AI across key business functions,” he says. “Over the next 18-24 months, we will further integrate AI across underwriting, customer interactions, and investor engagement, while maintaining human oversight where necessary.”
IPO and beyond
Arora declares that plans for an IPO are the next stage for the company. The company’s pre-IPO priorities, as articulated by Arora, are threefold. The first is to deepen its global footprint, particularly in emerging markets beyond its existing presence in the United States, India, and the Middle East. The second is to expand healthcare financing, building on partnerships already established with US payroll-services and healthcare-provider platforms, and to extend into adjacent insurance and provider-network ecosystems. The third is to continue investing in artificial intelligence capabilities to demonstrate the long-term growth runway that public-market investors will price into the equity story. The India engineering centre will scale in parallel, with approximately 200 additional hires planned across engineering, product, sales, and operations during the current financial year.
The listing itself is targeted within 14 to 18 months, on a US exchange. Whether the timing holds will depend in part on factors outside the company’s control. The current geopolitical environment in the Middle East has, by the company’s own account, slowed business in the UAE and Saudi Arabia by roughly 30 to 40 per cent relative to plan, a meaningful drag on what was forecast to be the company’s highest-growth market over the next 24 months.
The Biz2X model of India-engineered, US-listed and globally sold is structurally unusual. Beyond the timing of any single listing, what is significant is that the model itself is now demonstrable. India is increasingly a location from which globally significant financial infrastructure is being built, not merely supported or maintained, and the cross-border template Biz2X represents is one that Indian institutional investors and policymakers may need to evaluate seriously in the years ahead.
“India,” Arora emphasises, “can become a global leader in building AI-powered platform businesses.”