Nevesh | September 29, 2026
A digital payment can take seconds.
The decision of whether that payment looks legitimate must happen even faster.
That is the business Drona Pay has spent the last few years building.
The Mumbai-based fintech, founded in 2021 by Satish Kashyap, Pallavi Narvekar and Sukhdev Sinh Zala, started with a straightforward problem: financial institutions were moving money faster, but the systems protecting those transactions weren’t always built for the same speed or complexity.
Today, Drona Pay positions itself as a real-time fraud and risk platform for banks, fintechs, payment businesses and other financial institutions. Its technology looks at transaction behaviour, devices, IP addresses, geography, user activity and other signals to identify suspicious activity before it turns into a financial loss.
That sounds like another fintech security company.
It isn’t quite that simple.
The difficult part of fraud prevention is not spotting something unusual. It is deciding whether that unusual behaviour is actually dangerous.
A customer travelling to another city can look suspicious.
A new phone can look suspicious.
A large payment can look suspicious.
A customer suddenly logging in from a different device can look suspicious.
Block everything unusual and a bank frustrates genuine customers. Ignore too much and fraud gets through.
Drona Pay is building its business around that uncomfortable middle ground.
The problem starts where digital payments get faster
India’s digital payments boom has created an enormous surface area for financial fraud.
The fraud itself has also changed.
It is no longer only about stolen card details or somebody guessing a password. Account takeovers, mule accounts, phishing, social engineering, fake identities, device manipulation and coordinated transactions can make a legitimate-looking payment much harder to distinguish from a fraudulent one.
Drona Pay’s own platform reflects this shift. It offers fraud and scam prevention, behavioural biometrics, anti-money laundering, data analytics, decisioning and case management. Its technology can be deployed across payments, lending and other financial workflows.
The company says its system can work across UPI, internet banking, cards and other digital payment channels.
That matters because fraud does not respect product boundaries.
A bank may see a suspicious login.
A payment processor may see an unusual transaction.
A lender may see behaviour suggesting a risky borrower.
The underlying question is often the same:
Does this behaviour look like the customer, or does it look like someone trying to use the customer?
Drona Pay’s answer is to build a behavioural picture around the transaction.
It is less about a payment than the person behind it
One of Drona Pay’s more compelling pieces of technology is behavioural biometrics.
Instead of looking only at what a customer is doing, the system can examine how that customer behaves.
The kind of device being used.
The IP address.
The location.
The way an application is being navigated.
Typing patterns.
The time spent on different screens.
The speed and rhythm of interactions.
The company’s platform describes device fingerprinting, application interaction and keystroke dynamics as part of its behavioural analysis.
That creates a much richer picture than a simple rule such as “transaction above ₹1 lakh = high risk,” and that is where the business gets interesting.
Fraud prevention is ultimately a probability problem.
A system rarely knows with absolute certainty that a transaction is fraudulent before the money moves. The system is trying to make a sufficiently good decision based on incomplete information.
Drona Pay’s technology therefore has to balance two costs.
Let a fraudulent transaction go through, and the institution can lose money and potentially damage customer trust.
Stop too many legitimate transactions, and the institution creates friction for its own customers.
Drona Pay itself highlights this trade-off, particularly the need to reduce false positives while still catching genuine fraud.
That is a much harder problem than simply adding another security layer.
The founders came from systems where milliseconds mattered
Drona Pay was founded by Satish Kashyap, Pallavi Narvekar and Sukhdev Sinh Zala.
According to YourStory, the founders came with long experience at the National Stock Exchange, spanning trading systems, risk analytics, real-time data engineering and large financial platforms.
That background helps explain the company’s approach.
Financial markets have always operated on the idea that decisions made milliseconds earlier can matter.
Drona Pay is taking a similar philosophy into financial crime prevention.
The company says its platform generates real-time risk scores and processes transactions in milliseconds. YourStory reported in 2025 that one of Drona Pay’s clients was processing 100 million transactions in a single day using its system.
That is an important detail.
For a consumer app, speed can be a feature.
For fraud infrastructure, speed is part of the product itself.
A fraud alert that arrives after the transaction is completed is not much of a fraud-prevention system.
The ₹3.2 crore round was only the starting point
Drona Pay raised ₹3.2 crore in a seed round in November 2021.
The round came from Varanium Capital, Credit Saison and a group of fintech entrepreneurs and angel investors including Kunal Shah, Jitendra Gupta and Amrish Rau. The company said the money would be used to expand its technology and product teams and strengthen its presence among banks and fintech companies.
Inc42’s current company data records one disclosed funding round and places total funding at about $429,000, while the source material supplied for this article records Drona Pay’s total funding at $500,000. The difference appears to reflect differences in databases and reporting methodology, so the funding figure should not be treated as a precise current measure of capital raised.
What is more revealing is what happened after that round.
Drona Pay has not followed the familiar startup script of repeatedly raising larger rounds and using fundraising itself as the headline measure of progress.
YourStory reported in 2025 that the company had been profitable since its second year and had maintained more than 100% year-on-year growth. Inc42’s current company data puts FY25 revenue at ₹8.5 crore, up from ₹4.8 crore in FY24.
That changes the way the company should be looked at.
The funding is part of the story.
It is not the story.
The business is moving closer to the infrastructure layer
Drona Pay’s product catalogue has expanded beyond a basic fraud-detection proposition.
Its platform now covers payment fraud, scams, behavioural biometrics, anti-money laundering, early-warning systems, decisioning and claims-related fraud.
The company also offers different deployment models, including on-premise, cloud, SaaS and hybrid environments.
That is particularly relevant in financial services.
Banks cannot always move sensitive customer information into an external system simply because a startup has a better product. Compliance, data security, legacy infrastructure and internal technology architecture all matter.
Drona Pay says its platform can work within a bank’s environment and supports cloud-agnostic deployment. YourStory reported that the company works within client environments and that sensitive data can be hashed or tokenised, with data remaining in India.
For a young fintech, this is an important part of the sales proposition.
The product cannot merely be clever.
It has to fit into the institution buying it.
Mule accounts are becoming another battleground
One area where Drona Pay has expanded its focus is mule-account detection.
A mule account can be used to receive, move or disguise money linked to fraud or other illegal activity. The challenge for banks is that the account itself may not immediately look suspicious.
The suspicious pattern can emerge only when transactions, devices, locations and relationships are viewed together.
Drona Pay says its platform uses customer profiles, transaction history, behavioural data, device information, IP data, geolocation and other signals to identify risk.
The company was also selected as a finalist at the RBI’s HaRBInger 2024 for a solution aimed at detecting and preventing mule accounts using machine learning, according to YourStory.
That is significant for another reason.
The fraud problem keeps changing.
A product built around one fixed fraud pattern becomes outdated quickly. A platform that can change rules, models and risk signals as the behaviour changes has a better chance of remaining useful.
That makes the technology less like a static security product and more like an operating layer for financial risk.
The next test is outside India
For its first few years, Drona Pay concentrated on the Indian market.
By 2025, the company was looking towards Southeast Asia and the Middle East, according to YourStory. The company argued that the underlying fraud problems in those markets have similarities to India and that experience handling large transaction volumes domestically could help it compete abroad.
This is where the story becomes harder.
Fraud is global.
But banking infrastructure is not.
Every new market brings different regulations, payment rails, customer behaviour, data rules and banking systems. A fraud model that works well in India cannot simply be copied into another country and expected to perform in exactly the same way.
For Drona Pay, international expansion will therefore test more than its technology.
It will test how portable the business really is.
There is another challenge.
The company is entering a market with established global names and specialist fraud platforms. Its own positioning places it against legacy systems as well as newer fraud-risk companies.
That means the pitch cannot simply be that Drona Pay is cheaper or newer.
It has to prove that it can make better risk decisions, operate at scale and integrate deeply enough into financial institutions that replacing it becomes difficult.
The bigger opportunity is sitting between fraud and decision-making
This may be the most interesting part of Drona Pay’s evolution.
Fraud prevention can look like a narrow category.
Risk decisioning is much bigger.
The same information used to identify a suspicious transaction can help determine whether a customer should receive a particular offer, whether a loan application needs closer examination, whether a claim requires investigation or whether an account deserves additional scrutiny.
Drona Pay’s own product suite already points in this direction, with decisioning, delinquency reduction, profiling, early-warning systems and claims decisioning sitting alongside fraud prevention.
That creates a broader business possibility.
Instead of selling one fraud product to a bank, Drona Pay can potentially become part of how the institution makes a wider set of risk decisions.
However, there is a limitation.
Every additional use case increases the importance of accuracy, explainability, privacy and compliance.
The deeper the platform goes into financial decision-making, the less room there is for a black-box product that simply says “high risk”.
Banks need to know why something was flagged, what action should follow and whether the system can withstand regulatory and customer scrutiny.
That is where Drona Pay’s next phase will be decided.
The Nevesh View Point
Drona Pay’s most interesting number may not be its funding.
It may not even be its revenue.
It is the amount of time available to stop a fraudulent transaction.
The company’s business sits in a part of fintech that consumers rarely see. There is no flashy consumer app to download and no obvious daily habit that makes the product visible.
But every successful transaction that passes through a bank or payment system creates another opportunity for fraud.
The winner in this category will not necessarily be the company with the loudest fraud-prevention pitch.
It will be the one that can sit quietly inside financial infrastructure, understand changing behaviour, make decisions quickly and avoid punishing legitimate customers along the way.
Drona Pay has spent its early years building towards that problem.
Its next phase is harder: proving that the technology can scale across institutions, markets and increasingly sophisticated forms of fraud while maintaining the profitability it has already demonstrated.
That is a very different startup story from how most funding announcements are written.
And perhaps the more useful one.
Nevesh will continue tracking the companies, founders and ideas shaping India’s business landscape, bringing you not just the headlines, but the context behind them.