axiTrust — turning a regulatory shift into a new digital business

The regulation created a market

In 2022, India opened the market for surety bond insurance. For decades, businesses bidding for contracts had largely relied on bank guarantees. IRDAI’s Surety Insurance Contracts Guidelines created an alternative: insurers could provide performance guarantees without businesses having to lock up the same banking capital.

The regulation created a market. It did not create the infrastructure required to make that market work.

axiTrust set out to build it. We worked closely with the founders from the early stages, helping translate a new regulatory opportunity into a product, underwriting system, and operating model that insurers, businesses, and beneficiaries could actually use.

Understand the industry first

There was no established digital surety category in India to copy. So we started with the ecosystem.

We studied the regulatory framework and mapped how a surety bond moved between the parties involved. A contractor or MSME needed a bond. An insurer needed enough information to understand and price the risk. A beneficiary needed to know that the bond was legitimate and enforceable. axiTrust needed to sit between them without becoming another layer of friction.

That meant understanding not only the regulation, but how each participant actually worked.

One transaction, four users

The platform could not be designed around a single customer journey. We designed interconnected workflows for the major participants in the ecosystem.

Principals could apply for bonds, submit financial and business documents, and track applications. Insurers could review applications, assess risk, underwrite businesses, and issue bonds. Beneficiaries could validate and accept the instruments being issued. axiTrust’s operations team needed visibility across the entire process, including documentation, compliance, and audit trails.

Each participant saw a different product. Underneath, they were all operating on the same transaction. Getting those workflows to work together was the actual design problem.

The underwriting bottleneck

Digitizing the application process was not enough. Surety was a new category for Indian insurers, and underwriting MSMEs remained difficult. The information required to understand these businesses was fragmented across financial statements, compliance records, business history, and other sources.

So we started thinking beyond the marketplace itself. We worked on an MSME underwriting module that brought those signals together and helped assess the business behind each application. Instead of simply passing applications from businesses to insurers, axiTrust could provide structured risk assessments and underwriting recommendations.

That changed the business model. A product feature became a potential revenue stream. axiTrust could position itself not only as the infrastructure connecting the market, but as an underwriting partner to insurers.

The work moved beyond the product

As the company developed, the work kept following whatever problem was most important. We designed the platform, dashboards, workflows, wireframes, and prototypes. We worked with the founders on demos and helped turn a complicated insurance product into something investors and institutional stakeholders could understand.

We presented the concept to investor panels and stakeholders connected with the Ministry of Commerce and the GeM ecosystem.

As the technology stack expanded, we also worked on the infrastructure around the product: exploring external data and APIs for underwriting, evaluating technology partners, and working with agencies and vendors on systems including loan-management infrastructure. That meant translating business requirements into technical requirements, comparing approaches, negotiating budgets, and coordinating external teams.

Sometimes the answer was something we needed to build. Sometimes it was an API. Sometimes it was existing software. Sometimes we needed another specialist entirely. The job increasingly became figuring out which answer made sense and then helping get it implemented.

From regulation to a commercial business

axiTrust went on to secure ₹22.4 crore in investment and generated ₹10+ crore in revenue in its first year. The underwriting capability became part of the company’s proposition to insurers, addressing one of the biggest barriers to serving MSMEs in the emerging surety market. axiTrust established itself early in India’s developing digital surety bond ecosystem.

We would not attribute those outcomes to a prototype or a set of screens. The interesting part is what had to happen before those numbers were possible.

A new regulation had to be understood. An offline industry had to be mapped. Multiple parties with competing requirements had to be brought into one system. A difficult underwriting problem had to become a product. That product needed a commercial model. And the entire idea had to become understandable enough for insurers, government stakeholders, investors, and customers to believe it could work.

What this taught us

axiTrust changed how we approach new businesses. We do not start by asking what we should design or build. We start by asking how the industry works, where money moves, who makes decisions, what prevents those decisions from happening, and where the real bottleneck sits.

Sometimes that leads to software. At axiTrust, it led from regulation to workflows, from workflows to underwriting, from underwriting to a new revenue model, and eventually into the broader infrastructure required to operate the business.

The work was not about digitizing surety bonds. It was about figuring out what had to exist for a new market to actually work. That way of working became part of how we approach NextGrid today.

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