Pine Labs-Owned Setu Partners SarvamAI To Build LLM For Financial Services

Pine Labs-owned Setu on Tuesday (May 7) claims to have launched India’s first large language model (LLM) specifically designed for the banking and financial services industry (BFSI) sector.

Called Sesame, the LLM has been developed in collaboration with homegrown GenAI startup SarvamAI, and has been trained on custom local data relevant to the sector. 

The fintech startup said that the model leverages internal company data to help enterprises improve processes such as credit underwriting, fraud detection, loan monitoring and personal finance advisory. 

The new offering is expected to help Setu roll out new offerings catering to consumers in the BFSI sector and expand its product portfolio. As per the company, the new product is also expected to help enterprises “significantly increase the accuracy of identifying insights from financial statements”. 

“We believe that the powerful combination of the account aggregator framework and transformative technologies like LLMs is the key to making this a reality… We are excited to build meaningful, compliant, and responsible AI applications that showcase India’s leadership in applied AI,” said Setu cofounder Nikhil Kumar.

Commenting on launch, SarvamAI cofounder Pratyush Kumar added, “Our collaboration with Setu is an example of bringing this technology to create value in the BFSI space. We showed that we can significantly increase the accuracy of identifying insights from financial statements. This is a template which we believe can be repeated across sectors where India has created foundational digital public goods”.

Founded in 2018 by Sahil Kini and Kumar, Setu is an application programming interface (API) infrastructure provider that offers services across bill payments, savings, credit and payments. The startup was acquired by fintech unicorn Pine Labs for around $70 Mn in 2022. 

SarvamAI was founded in July last year by Vivek Raghavan and Kumar, and aims to develop custom-made large language models (LLMs) designed for India-centric use cases. The GenAI startup grabbed headlines after it raised a $41 Mn Series A funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in December 2023.

With this, Setu has become the latest homegrown fintech startup to jump on the AI bandwagon. From using the emerging technology for personalising financial experiences to simplifying customer support processes of banks and other financial institutions, GenAI is witnessing a rapid adoption by the sector.

This growing demand has spawned the rise of names such as InsurStaq.ai, Alltius. Gnani.ai. among others catering specifically to the financial services space. Many others are also using the technology to streamline processes internally and efficiency. 

At the heart of all this is the Indian GenAI ecosystem which, as per Inc42, is poised to become a $17 Bn market by 2030.

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