According to Oberoi, Swarnim University now has a resident capacity of about 5,500 students, and became a “building block” for spawning more startups.

Oberoi said he has turned focus to bridge the affordability gap in higher education, as “kids want to go to a great college but can’t afford paying one-shot fees.”

His solution: tech-led P2P financing tailored for tuition, with instant credit assessment algorithms and structures attractive to lenders. The model, he said, aimed to “create a good IRR for NBFCs, create an arbitrage for my tech company, and finance those students without a guarantor.”

Oberoi claimed the platform built an “army of almost 14 lakh students” accessing funding, while acting as a bridge between the priority sector lending (PSL) requirements of banks and the return expectations of NBFCs. “We built a track record and then flipped it to priority sector lending from banks,” he said.