Shubham lends to Indians banks can't see — 65% informal incomes, near $1B AUM

Affordable home loans and loans against property for self-employed Indians with informal incomes.

Informal-income borrowers with messy titles are creditworthy if underwritten the hard way: field visits, khata and UPI records, and 10,000 micro-markets of data.

Chaturvedi, a large-ticket lender at Citi, HSBC and GE, saw a huge population outside formal credit despite stable economic lives; Shubham registered as India's 48th housing finance company.

Built a price-pegging database across ~10,000 property micro-markets, income templates per trade, an in-house risk team of engineers, lawyers and fraud specialists; BII invested from 2017; a year of AI proofs of concept now qualifies leads and aids training and collections.

Around 80% of urban Indians have some informal income — a market conventional underwriting excludes outright.

Field observation such as footfall, khata and UPI records establishes income that salary slips cannot.

Micro-market property knowledge de-risks titles like Khasra and Lal Dora that look unbankable on paper.

Standard templates turn one officer's local judgment into a repeatable underwriting machine across 200+ branches.

Where documents fail, fieldwork underwrites: watching footfall at a food stall can beat a salary slip as a credit signal — but only if that judgment is templated so it scales beyond heroes.

As of 9 October 2026, Shubham is approaching the $1 billion AUM milestone its founders once called a dream, with 200+ branches and a distributed field force. AI proofs of concept are cutting the cost of qualifying lakhs of monthly leads and of training new hires across branches. The company targets growing at least twice as fast as the affordable housing segment's 17–18% annual pace, as falling funding costs widen the borrowers it can serve.