Kissht Lists. Nine Years in the Making.
In 2016, two things happened. Ranvir Singh and Krishnan Vishwanathan founded Kissht. And Endiya Partners was founded. Same year, different missions. Endiya was built to back IP-driven technology companies with a structural edge in large Indian markets. Kissht was built to bring formal credit to the hundreds of millions of Indians the financial system had historically underserved. What connected them was a belief that technology applied rigorously to hard problems creates durable businesses. In 2017, Ranvir and Krishnan flew to Hyderabad to meet me. The segment was still early and not widely understood. Digital lending to India’s mass-market borrower was an unproven hypothesis. The salaried professional, the self-employed individual earning between Rs 5 lakh and Rs 15 lakh, had limited access to formal credit, with little or no collateral and minimal engagement with traditional lenders. Ranvir and Krishnan believed that was a data problem, not a credit problem. Build the right underwriting infrastructure and you could serve this segment profitably at scale.I believed them. Endiya wrote the seed cheque.Today, Kissht lists on BSE and NSE. It is Endiya’s tenth year as a firm. I did not plan the symmetry. But I will take it.
