Abhishek Tripathi ✓
I fall in love with problems. For 16 years, they've all been about moving money.
Dubai · building AI-native products
Overview #
Hello #
I'm Abhishek (call me AT). Uri Levine says to fall in love with the problem, not the solution. I've been doing that since 2009, before I knew it had a name.
The problems that seduced me:
- Things nobody could order without internet.
- A country that didn't trust digital money.
- 51 million businesses that couldn't accept a payment.
- Bank accounts that took 3 days to open.
- Over 200 million individuals unbanked and unserved.
- Immigrants losing a day's wage in fees to send money home.
Each one became a chapter: Paytm (one of the first employees), PayU India, India's first payments bank, PegB, Paysend, Careem Pay, and most recently Aspora, where Sequoia Capital hired me to head product. There, we moved money to India at a $6B annualized rate, roughly 5% of everything the country receives.
The solutions changed every time: SMS, wallets, gateways, challenger banks, super-apps. The problem never did. Moving money is still harder than it should be.
Since late 2025 I've been building again, solo. Two products are live: ResiGuide.ai, which untangles the UK immigration journey for 2,000+ users, and Plaice.me, AI hiring infrastructure that gets great people to the right employers in days. Still chasing the same question underneath it all: what happens to money, and to consumer software, when agents can want things?
What loving problems produces (6) #
The next problem (4 suspects) #
- 01
Money still needs a human to move it
Every transfer starts with someone tapping a screen. When software can hold, move, and negotiate money, what does a financial product even look like? Not chatbots bolted onto banks. Agent-first, from scratch.
- 02
Crossing a border still costs trust
Three continents of remittance products later, the corridor problem (cost, speed, and above all trust) is still unsolved. Digital assets might finally be the honest answer.
- 03
The user is about to change species
Every product I've built assumed a human user. Agents acting on our behalf will unlock behaviors no interface ever made possible, and someone has to design for them first.
- 04
A new working class, still financially invisible
The gig economy has created a global class of workers with irregular income and no financial safety net. Credit, savings, and protection are all built for the salaried. Someone has to build for the rest.
Problems I fell in love with (9) #
- Built and shipped ResiGuide.ai, the tool that turns the UK settlement maze into one clear dashboard: ILR eligibility, the 180-day absence rule, and Life in the UK test prep. 2,000+ users, built on official gov.uk guidance
- Built and shipped Plaice.me, AI hiring infrastructure that replaces resume screening and interview loops with structured evaluation, matching great talent to selected employers to close roles in days, not months
- Exploring what happens to money, and to consumer software, when agents become first-class users. Reach out if you're building here too
- Hired by Sequoia Capital to head product
- Scaled to $6B annualized money moved to India, roughly 5% of the country's total remittance inflows
- Grew the platform to 800K users
- Took Careem Pay remittances 0 → 1: product-market fit in 3 months, scaled to $2B annualized in 18 months, the fastest-growing product in Careem's history
- Expanded corridors from the UAE to 31 countries, with 90%+ of Europe transfers landing in under 30 minutes at about half the cost of banks
- Built financial services used by millions: wallet, payments, bills, remittances
- Core lesson: in emerging markets, trust is the product
- Shipped the Global Account MVP in 5 months against a 9-month estimate, driving 150K users and 500K+ transactions in the first six months; the remittance product grew past 7M users
- Constructed the 5-year Mastercard partnership: €52.1M investment, €790M year-one volume, €16.8B five-year target
- One of 4 people (of 320) who pitched and closed the $125M Series B
- Rebuilt KYC: 4-level verification lifted onboarding +23% ($70K/month saved); automated ID checks cut verification from 3.5 hours → 8 minutes
- Partnerships with Apple, Google, Samsung: Apple Pay in 22 destinations, +$20M annual volume
- NLP on support data shifted 60% of questions to self-serve, lifting Trustpilot to 4.5/5
- Cash-in/cash-out rails with KCB, SportPesa, Pambazuka (Kenya), Flash (South Africa), reaching 2M transactions and $20M volume within two quarters
- Fraud management saving $20K/month
- Led 4 devs building a proprietary CRM → +24% sales revenue