Announcing our $825k pre-seed, to build India’s bank of 2035
Announcing our $825k pre-seed, to build India’s bank of 2035
Nov 24, 2025
Dear builder,
Banking in 2035 it will be driven by AI-agents - and Riverline is building that bank, 1 AI-agent at a time.
But instead of starting with lending, we’re starting at the exact opposite end. You see, to lend effectively as a bank, you need to have a reliable debt-recovery system. Collections is the hardest bottleneck for India’s credit growth right now because no company who has cracked compassionate and completely tech-led solutions, at scale.Today, debt-collections is an unglamorous business run by incumbent bank managers with large call-centers, not world-class engineers who obsess about the experience.
And yes, unlike AI-demos out there, our AI-agents are already in production, handling recovery for over 100cr+ in bad-loans monthly, creating real impact with borrower-first lenders like CRED, Freo, Nira, Propelld.
Today, as we talk to 10,000s of borrowers, we’re now building AI to serve more personalized, financial services to the millions of such credit-underserviced Indians. And that’s our bank of 2035.
But before all of this, we were 3 engineers from IIT, who liked to build with each other. That’s still a constant today.
So that’s why this fundraising announcement letter is 1-of-a-kind because it’s not like loud shoutouts to traction/investors/sexy-ideas or rocketship-growth from the get-go. It’s a personal note from the 3 of us, to the most passionate engineers out there, to share our true, hacky story of going up against incumbents, to create an institution for India.
Ok, but how did we get here?
Being 23 years old and having no background in banking helped us reimagine this process from a scientific perspective. Our 1st product, a call-analysis tool, was so specialized for collection call-centers that we got paid from our first customer before the company was officially incorporated! And suddenly this tool started gaining traction with pilots from top Indian NBFCs. But with this very tool, we understood how badly borrowers are treated, and decided to remodel such hard conversations, not just analyse them. So, when we built our v1 of AI-collection-agents in February, we designed the emotion behind each word they say to a borrower. But it wasn’t enough!
So, we raised $825k from SouthParkCommons, with follow-ons from DeVC and gradCapital and top-angels (like founders/leaders-suite of Google, Meta, Groww, M2P, HyperVerge, Easemytrip, Nutanix).
Now, we’re doubling down on building trust with borrowers. To give you an example, we’ve seen borrowers who connect with AI-agents and thank them for patient followups. This is grounded in our faith that - people aren’t bad, situations are.
So each experience to a borrower and to bank is designed on our 4 principles of debt-recovery
(1) Seek to make each borrower your family member
(2) Provide certainty and fair-value to bank
(3) Be super-scientific and data-driven about each nudge
(4) Use only tech-infra to scale, not ops.
To get to this, we built a stellar team of 9, from backgrounds including IIT, Carnegie Mellon University, Navi and ex-founders - where we tackle important problems in credit, AI and borrower-psychology everyday.
“Imagine, each day, you’re stepping into a control-panel of AI-agents who’re talking to 10,000s of borrowers everyday nationwide, to understand their problem and arrive at a fair resolution with the bank.
You have to grow this system’s scale 2x each month and push the limits of innovation on AI (multi-agent systems, self-learning agents, etc.), systems-design (telecalling systems handling 100k+ everyday) and performance-analytics (LLM evals, engagement-metrics, risk). That’s what each day at Riverline feels like.”
So yes, these funds & traction is just the beginning for us and for you.
Remember - the goal is to build a bank. Unlike all NBFCs/banks that came before us, we’re going to not start with sourcing and risk, but first solve the collections bottleneck with operational excellence, mitigate risk, build trust with each borrower and then, build upwards.
A completely new “bottoms-up approach” to building a bank.
If this sounds exciting, come find us at riverline.ai/careers
With love, 💜
Abhishek, Ankit & Jayanth,
Founders @ Riverline
Dear builder,
Banking in 2035 it will be driven by AI-agents - and Riverline is building that bank, 1 AI-agent at a time.
But instead of starting with lending, we’re starting at the exact opposite end. You see, to lend effectively as a bank, you need to have a reliable debt-recovery system. Collections is the hardest bottleneck for India’s credit growth right now because no company who has cracked compassionate and completely tech-led solutions, at scale.Today, debt-collections is an unglamorous business run by incumbent bank managers with large call-centers, not world-class engineers who obsess about the experience.
And yes, unlike AI-demos out there, our AI-agents are already in production, handling recovery for over 100cr+ in bad-loans monthly, creating real impact with borrower-first lenders like CRED, Freo, Nira, Propelld.
Today, as we talk to 10,000s of borrowers, we’re now building AI to serve more personalized, financial services to the millions of such credit-underserviced Indians. And that’s our bank of 2035.
But before all of this, we were 3 engineers from IIT, who liked to build with each other. That’s still a constant today.
So that’s why this fundraising announcement letter is 1-of-a-kind because it’s not like loud shoutouts to traction/investors/sexy-ideas or rocketship-growth from the get-go. It’s a personal note from the 3 of us, to the most passionate engineers out there, to share our true, hacky story of going up against incumbents, to create an institution for India.
Ok, but how did we get here?
Being 23 years old and having no background in banking helped us reimagine this process from a scientific perspective. Our 1st product, a call-analysis tool, was so specialized for collection call-centers that we got paid from our first customer before the company was officially incorporated! And suddenly this tool started gaining traction with pilots from top Indian NBFCs. But with this very tool, we understood how badly borrowers are treated, and decided to remodel such hard conversations, not just analyse them. So, when we built our v1 of AI-collection-agents in February, we designed the emotion behind each word they say to a borrower. But it wasn’t enough!
So, we raised $825k from SouthParkCommons, with follow-ons from DeVC and gradCapital and top-angels (like founders/leaders-suite of Google, Meta, Groww, M2P, HyperVerge, Easemytrip, Nutanix).
Now, we’re doubling down on building trust with borrowers. To give you an example, we’ve seen borrowers who connect with AI-agents and thank them for patient followups. This is grounded in our faith that - people aren’t bad, situations are.
So each experience to a borrower and to bank is designed on our 4 principles of debt-recovery
(1) Seek to make each borrower your family member
(2) Provide certainty and fair-value to bank
(3) Be super-scientific and data-driven about each nudge
(4) Use only tech-infra to scale, not ops.
To get to this, we built a stellar team of 9, from backgrounds including IIT, Carnegie Mellon University, Navi and ex-founders - where we tackle important problems in credit, AI and borrower-psychology everyday.
“Imagine, each day, you’re stepping into a control-panel of AI-agents who’re talking to 10,000s of borrowers everyday nationwide, to understand their problem and arrive at a fair resolution with the bank.
You have to grow this system’s scale 2x each month and push the limits of innovation on AI (multi-agent systems, self-learning agents, etc.), systems-design (telecalling systems handling 100k+ everyday) and performance-analytics (LLM evals, engagement-metrics, risk). That’s what each day at Riverline feels like.”
So yes, these funds & traction is just the beginning for us and for you.
Remember - the goal is to build a bank. Unlike all NBFCs/banks that came before us, we’re going to not start with sourcing and risk, but first solve the collections bottleneck with operational excellence, mitigate risk, build trust with each borrower and then, build upwards.
A completely new “bottoms-up approach” to building a bank.
If this sounds exciting, come find us at riverline.ai/careers
With love, 💜
Abhishek, Ankit & Jayanth,
Founders @ Riverline