Welcome to SmartCoin!
Founded in 2016, SmartCoin is a mobile-based lending platform that provides instant credit for the vast underserved lower and middle-income communities, using cutting-edge AI/ML technologies.
Partnered with RBI-registered NBFCs, our product offering includes small-ticket personal loans to micro-merchants, self-employed and salaried individuals, who mainly borrow to fund their economic advancement.
Our Story
Back in 2015, while interacting with one of the auto drivers during a ride, Rohit Garg (Co-founder and CEO) was shocked to know that the driver would routinely borrow small sums of Rs.1000 for petrol from his local lender at as high as 10% interest for a day. Upon further market research and discussions with various financial institutions and underserved borrowers, Rohit realized that formal credit access is severely restricted in India. One of the major reasons is that financial institutions have traditionally relied on credit histories to price a borrower’s risk, and are unable to serve people with limited data. That in itself is a chicken and egg problem leaving a vast majority out of the system. Additionally, heavier cost base and manual processes render small-ticket loans unprofitable for these financial institutions. As a result, India has one of the highest dependence on informal sector borrowing with related issues of one falling into debt trap and negative impact on their wellbeing.
Rohit along with his friends – Jayant Upadhyay, Amit Chandel, and Vinay Singh founded SmartCoin with the aim of bringing greater financial inclusion, and providing affordable and reliable access to credit to the vast underserved middle/lower-income segments. We decided to use mobile as a medium of our customer interaction to leverage the benefits of technology and also to reduce the barriers of access that drive up the cost of operations and deprive the creditworthy borrowers of access to timely and affordable credit.
Meet the Founders

Rohit Garg - Cofounder & CEO completed his B. Tech in Computer Science from IIT-Kanpur and his MBA from IIM-A. Before turning into an entrepreneur, Rohit has worked with Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley and has also served as the Vice-President at Nomura, a Japanese financial services group. Rohit is passionate towards bringing social change via tech and has been a strong believer in the Emerging India and aims to serve the underserved segments of the country with Financial Inclusion.

Amit Chandel - Cofounder and CTO completed his B.tech in Computer Science from IIT Bombay and then went on to do his M.S from the University of Toronto. He has 9 years of extensive work experience as a director of Engineering at Kiwi Inc., a Mobile Entertainment company, where he built a data science platform to handle and process over 100M transactions per day (10TB of monthly data).

Jayant Upadhyay - Cofounder and COO holds a B.tech and M.tech degree in Computer Science from IT Delhi. In his previous role with Kiwi Inc., he served as Team Lead - Ad Products for 7 years where he built a digital Ad platform and back-end design for 1M+ Monthly Active Users. Jayant has been successfully managing the Operations, Finance and Marketing of SmartCoin since the company's foundation.

Vinay Singh - Cofounder and CPO has completed his B.Tech and M.Tech from IIT Bombay. Being from a Technology background has helped in leading the Engineering Department at Kiwi Inc., where he worked for 8 years as Director of Engineering before Co-Founding SmartCoin. At Kiwi, he built scalable android products for over 100M+ Monthly Active Users and scaled the technology team since inception to over 100+ Software Development Engineers.