Shashank Agarwal

Shashank Agarwal is an Indian entrepreneur and technologist whose career has been defined by building AI-powered risk and fraud systems for some of the largest digital payments platforms in the world. He studied at Rajasthan Technical University before building his career in India's fintech ecosystem, developing deep expertise in machine learning, product engineering, and trust and safety at scale.

Agarwal co-founded Third Watch, an AI-driven fraud prevention company that used machine learning to detect and prevent fraudulent transactions in real time. Third Watch was acquired by Razorpay, one of India's leading B2B payment gateways and a company valued at over $7.5 billion, validating the quality and commercial relevance of the technology he had built. Following the acquisition, Agarwal moved to PhonePe — India's largest B2C payments platform — where he served as Director of Product Management, leading the company's trust and compliance engineering function at a scale involving hundreds of millions of active users.

In 2024, Agarwal partnered with Ritesh Singhania to co-found Zango, bringing his AI systems expertise into the regulatory compliance domain. As Co-Founder and CTO, he leads Zango's engineering and product development, building the regulation-specific large language models and AI agent architecture that form the core of the platform. His background in building fraud detection systems at scale — where accuracy, speed, and zero false negatives are non-negotiable — translates directly into the compliance context, where the cost of regulatory error is equally severe.

Zango raised $4.8 million in July 2025, led by Nexus Venture Partners, and has attracted clients including Novobanco, Monzo, and Juni. The company's Bengaluru engineering centre, led by Agarwal's team, is central to the platform's AI development roadmap as it expands from banking into insurance and asset management.