From Wall Street algorithms to the booths of Bihar, one man is trying to bring empirical rigor to the chaos of Indian elections.
Digital lending in India suffers from high first-party fraud (users who never intend to pay back). Kodishala led the development of a that reduced fraud rates by nearly 40% in one of his previous ventures. By mapping how multiple loan applications came from the same IP address or shared contact lists, the system flagged suspicious clusters before a single rupee was disbursed. Chanakya Kodishala
This work laid the foundation for "instant" digital loans that did not require human underwriters. From Wall Street algorithms to the booths of
His initial roles saw him working with established IT services giants, where he was exposed to large-scale data processing and legacy banking systems. This period was crucial. It was here that Kodishala observed the core inefficiency of Indian banking: the sheer inability to process small-ticket loans quickly. Banks were built for large corporates, not for the neighborhood grocery store or the freelance designer. This observation would become the thesis for his later work. By mapping how multiple loan applications came from
: He served as a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Rheumatology at Mayo Clinic , Rochester, Minnesota.