SBI plans to support startups post-Series B: Setty

MUMBAI: SBI chairman C S Setty on Wednesday said that most banks don’t have the risk appetite to fund startups at an early stage indicating the bank’s readiness to participate in funding from the Series B stage and beyond.
“We need to work out an ecosystem where the equity support from the banking system is also available to the startups,” Setty said at the Nasscom Technology & Leadership Forum 2025 in Mumbai on Tuesday.
He mentioned that the government is considering implementing a guarantee programme that would offer support for startup loans extending up to Rs 100 crore.
Setty said that the bank worked with 33 fintech companies on the Yono application. “What we realise is that in many cases, they don’t come to the scale at which this needs to be operated. While the solution looks very interesting, we are not able to bring it to the standard of operations.”
“We have the largest database from the data we originate every day because the high volume of transactions is massive in size in terms of the data warehouse. So, we’ve invested in every aspect of technology and not just customer journeys. Today, we were the first bank in India to set up a resilience operation centre,” Setty added.
Meanwhile, Setty said SBI is “working very seriously” to improve its agri loan vertical, where it will be using satellite data and other structured and unstructured data sets to better serve the farmers. The PSU lender rolled out an SME lending scheme where loans are disbursed within 15 minutes using AI and data for validation.
“I think we must go more and more to extensive use of data not only in SME lending. We did well in retail loans. We widely used it in agriculture. I think we are going to focus on how both satellite technology, structured and unstructured data related to the farmer and the crop patterns which are available. We are working very seriously in terms of making the fruits of technology available to the farmers,” Setty added.