Priyanka Kanwar

riyanka is passionate about helping people from all backgrounds access modern finance. She founded Kite to empower businesses and their employees with innovative and low-cost payments, capital, and financial services. Launched in 2017, Kite's platform has processed over USD 70 million in transactions and served 150,000 users from 1,200 cities, building financial identities with more than 6 million data points.

The idea for Kite first came to Priyanka at age 17, while shooting a documentary film on the plight of microfinance borrowers in India and globally. Subsequently, at Yale, as Tobin Research Fellow at the Department of Economics, she continued conducting development research on the sustainable delivery of financial services in Honduras, Mexico, Uganda, Bangladesh, and India. Her thesis was among the first studies of the impact of the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) system on service delivery in India.