From Trust Deficit to Trusted Platform: How KarmaLife Built Financial Inclusion at Scale with HyperVerge

Industry: Fintech (Lending)

Location: India

Spokesperson: Naveen Budda, CTO & Co-founder, Karmalife

In 2019, long before it was formally registered as Onion Life in 2020, the idea of KarmaLife was already taking shape. Its founders, both technologists by training, were grappling with a systemic problem they saw around them every day: millions of blue-collar and gig workers were locked out of formal finance, not because they lacked intent or income, but because they lacked trust in the eyes of institutions.

Banks and lenders struggled to underwrite workers with irregular earnings and fragmented documentation. KarmaLife was born to change that reality. Not as a flashy consumer app, but as a welfare-first, B2B2C trust platform embedded directly into the ecosystems where these workers already earned their livelihoods.

Building for the Invisible Majority

KarmaLife’s earliest pilots began in late 2019 with platforms like Flipkart. The insight was simple but powerful: if financial services were offered inside trusted partner platforms, they would feel safer, more relevant, and more accessible.

Rather than going direct to consumers, KarmaLife partnered with large gig and commerce platforms such as Zepto, embedding financial access into daily work journeys. Financial inclusion, in KarmaLife’s view, was not a marketing slogan. It was an infrastructure problem to be solved with technology.

At its core, KarmaLife was always a tech company. Machine learning-led underwriting, automated decisioning, and scalable engineering formed the backbone of its operations. Two products anchored the offering: Earned Wage Access (EWA) for short-term liquidity, and Personal Loans (PLA) for longer-term needs. Together, they addressed cash-flow volatility without pushing users into predatory cycles.

By the time KarmaLife crossed 150 platform partnerships, it had already reached over 2 million users, with an annual run-rate of approximately ₹700 crore. Proof that inclusion and scale could coexist.

Trust Is Built (or Broken) at KYC

As KarmaLife scaled, a critical friction point became impossible to ignore: identity verification. A significant number of users submitted incorrect or fraudulent documents, while earlier KYC solutions introduced a different risk altogether: downtime.

When KYC flows broke, users dropped off. Worse, they rarely returned.

For a platform built on trust, this was unacceptable.

After evaluating multiple vendors, KarmaLife partnered with HyperVerge in 2020. The fit was immediate. HyperVerge’s face liveness detection, PAN verification, and Aadhaar-based verification workflows aligned seamlessly with KarmaLife’s digital journeys.

More importantly, the platform delivered where it mattered most: reliability and accuracy. Digilocker verifications consistently achieved ~99% accuracy, while PAN services maintained 95–96% accuracy. Downtime-related drop-offs became negligible.

HyperVerge’s proactive support further reinforced trust. Advance alerts about potential downtimes allowed KarmaLife to plan ahead and scale confidently. 

The impact went beyond metrics. A smooth, non-breaking onboarding flow meant users trusted the process and told others about it. Word-of-mouth became a growth lever, not a liability.

For partner platforms, the benefits were tangible. Offering KarmaLife’s embedded financial services reduced worker attrition by nearly 30%, improving platform stability while enhancing worker welfare. This is a rare alignment of business and social outcomes.

It reflects their confidence in the robustness and reliability of HyperVerge.

Looking Ahead: Trust as Infrastructure

KarmaLife’s ambition is clear: to be present across every major platform where India’s workforce earns, ensuring businesses run safely while workers are treated fairly. The long-term mission is simple yet expansive, to become a trusted platform for everyone.

The name “KarmaLife” itself reflects that intent. Coined during a boardroom discussion, it speaks to changing fate, using technology to rewrite outcomes for people historically excluded from the system.

With HyperVerge as a foundational partner in its trust stack, KarmaLife is not just enabling access to finance. It is quietly rebuilding confidence in the system, one verified identity, one seamless journey, and one changed life at a time.

Trust shouldn’t be the bottleneck in your user journey. Explore how HyperVerge helps platforms like KarmaLife build secure, high-conversion onboarding at scale.