How Two Indian Startups Are Replacing Paper With Digital Trust

At first glance, Digio and Trezix operate in entirely different worlds. One verifies a person's identity before they open a bank account or sign a loan document. The other tracks a container of iron ore as it moves from a Congolese mine to an Indian steel plant.

Yet strip away the industry jargon and a striking pattern emerges: both companies exist because some of the most important economic processes were, for decades, held together by paper, trust and human memory rather than verifiable data.

Both founders describe the same underlying mission in strikingly similar language: replacing documents with data and blind trust with auditable proof.

Technology isn’t the Problem

Digio founder Abhinav Parashar traces the company's origins to an attempt during his engineering days to solve peer-to-peer payments on basic Nokia handsets using SMS. That early struggle, he says, revealed something far bigger than a technical hurdle.

"So at that point I realised identity is one of the root problems of all of these processes to go digital. And then life happened. I joined a company, then came to Flipkart. But in parallel I was continuously exploring what to build."

That insight, sharpened years later by a conversation with Nandan Nilekani about India Stack, became the founding thesis of Digio: that consent — in its simplest form, a signature — was the missing digital primitive underpinning banking, lending and much else besides.

Sunil Kharbanda, Founder of Trezix, arrived at a parallel conclusion from the opposite end of enterprise software. Having spent nearly three decades implementing ERP systems for companies such as SAP and Oracle, he watched global trade explode in the 2000s while the software managing it remained resolutely internal.

"There was no methodology for an ERP to really adopt something which is external. When I say procurement, it is very simple. I have vendors, I put it in the system, it is inside my border."

Both founders, in other words, identified the same structural gap: critical, high-stakes transactions were being conducted on trust, memory and static paperwork in a world that had become too fast and interconnected for either.

From Documents to Data

The phrase each founder reaches for independently is telling.

Parashar describes Digio's evolution from digital signatures into full know-your-customer and anti-money laundering infrastructure, and now into compliance with India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act.

"First of all the organisation has to understand what kind of PII information is being used and where it is going — understanding, in a technical way, the systems where the data is flowing and where it is sitting."

Kharbanda uses an almost identical formulation to describe Trezix's platform. When a supplier's invoice lands in an importer's inbox, he explains, the system automatically converts it into structured data and checks it against the original purchase order.

"As soon as you get the email of his invoice, this platform automatically takes the invoice and converts it into data, so that the data can be validated against the purchase order. This is no longer a game of documents."

That both founders, working in unrelated sectors, land on the same document-to-data framing is not a coincidence. It reflects a broader shift in how regulators and enterprises are being asked to prove compliance, not through filing cabinets of signed forms, but through systems that can produce an unbroken, machine-readable audit trail on demand.

Regulation as Accelerant, Not Obstacle

Neither founder frames regulation as a burden to be minimised. Both instead describe it as the force that made their businesses possible.

Parashar makes this point about financial services, noting that regulatory clarity around digital signatures and Aadhaar-based mandates allowed lenders and banks to move online at scale.

Kharbanda makes an almost identical case about India's push, from around 2014 onward, to position exports as the "fourth pillar" of the economy. That push, he argues, forced tighter cross-border compliance and, in turn, made manual documentation commercially unviable.

This is a notable inversion of how technology and regulation are often assumed to interact, with innovation racing ahead and rules struggling to catch up. In both accounts, tightening regulatory expectations created the market for infrastructure providers such as Digio and Trezix.

Both founders are notably unsentimental about artificial intelligence, treating it as a practical requirement of their business models rather than a marketing flourish.

Parashar points out that Digio was using machine learning and computer vision techniques long before generative AI became fashionable because fraud detection was baked into the product from the outset. He is equally direct about how accessible forgery has since become.

"Like the AI is so accessible now, anybody can use your photo, input on your pan card, somebody's pan card, and then use it. At least people needed Photoshop that only certain people could do. But now it's very accessible."

Kharbanda describes a similar arc at Trezix, where AI agents now handle tasks ranging from routing sales enquiries to matching invoices against purchase orders.

Crucially, both founders insist that a human remains in the loop wherever a decision carries legal or regulatory weight.

"The system cannot automatically think whether someone is getting uranium for a nuclear plant, for a bomb, or for an EV. And if I make a mistake, you cannot blame the platform — I have the audit trail for every action."

A Shared Bet on Invisible Infrastructure

Perhaps the deepest connection between the two companies is ambition, not mechanism.

Neither wants to be the interface a customer notices. Kharbanda explicitly rejects the word "software" to describe Trezix, preferring "platform," because, he argues, a script merely displays screens while his system integrates, collaborates and orchestrates an entire cross-border transaction.

Parashar describes Digio's workflow layer in similar terms: a configurable backbone that more than 2,000 financial services entities plug into without having to solve identity verification themselves.

Both are, in effect, betting that the next decade of enterprise growth in India will be won not by companies that build customer-facing products, but by those that quietly build the trust layer underneath them — the plumbing that makes it possible to sign a contract, clear a customs shipment, or open a bank account with confidence that the person, the document, and the data all agree.