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.
