Akhil Bhiwal

Founder & CEO Phyllo

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Akhil Bhiwal is founder and Chief Executive Officer of Phyllo, a data infrastructure company he started in August 2021 with co-founders Achintya Gupta and Mohit Kumar. Phyllo provides a single universal API through which developers can access creator data — identity, engagement, content and income — from hundreds of social platforms, with the creator’s consent. The comparison most often drawn is to Plaid in financial services, and it is apt: before Phyllo, any business that needed verified data about a creator’s audience or earnings had to build and maintain a separate integration against every platform’s API, each with different schemas, rate limits and terms, and each liable to change without notice. Phyllo normalises that into one interface. The problem is more consequential than it first appears, because a great many downstream decisions depend on it — influencer marketing agencies pricing campaigns, lenders underwriting creators as borrowers, and identity and visa verification providers assessing income. Bhiwal came to it from exactly the right place, having been Product Lead at Setu, an Indian financial infrastructure API company, and having previously founded the fintech startup Loktra. Phyllo raised a $15 million Series A led by RTP Global.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of Phyllo, established in August 2021 with co-founders Achintya Gupta and Mohit Kumar.
• Raised a $15 million Series A led by RTP Global.
• Built a universal API for consented access to creator identity, engagement, content and income data across hundreds of social platforms.
• Expanded the business from authenticated creator tools at launch into broad platform coverage and AI-driven products, serving influencer marketing agencies, financial services, and identity and visa verification providers.
• Product Lead at Setu, the Indian financial infrastructure API company.
• Founder of Loktra, a fintech startup, before Phyllo.
• More than ten years of product and engineering experience.

Professional Journey

Bhiwal trained as an engineer, taking a B.Tech at VIT University in India and an M.S. at the University of Southern California, and has spent more than a decade in product and engineering roles.

His first venture was Loktra, a fintech startup that he founded. He subsequently joined Setu as Product Lead. Setu’s business is financial infrastructure delivered as APIs — abstracting the messy, fragmented plumbing of Indian banking and payments behind clean developer interfaces. That role is the key to understanding Phyllo, because the intellectual move Bhiwal made was to recognise that the creator economy had precisely the same problem financial services had, at precisely the same stage of maturity: valuable data locked behind dozens of incompatible platform APIs, with every downstream business forced to solve the integration problem independently.

Phyllo was founded in August 2021 by Bhiwal with Achintya Gupta and Mohit Kumar, and is based in San Francisco. The product is a data gateway that pulls creator data directly from source platforms with the creator’s consent and returns it in a normalised form. The consent mechanism matters commercially as well as ethically: data obtained through scraping is legally fragile and frequently inaccurate, whereas data a creator has authorised through platform OAuth is both reliable and defensible, which is what makes it usable for underwriting or verification rather than only for marketing estimates.

The company raised a $15 million Series A led by RTP Global, announced in 2022, funding product development and platform coverage. Under Bhiwal’s leadership Phyllo has broadened considerably from its 2021 starting point of authenticated creator tools. Its stated customer set now spans influencer marketing agencies, financial services businesses that need verified creator income, and identity and visa verification providers — the last being a striking illustration of how far creator-platform data has moved from marketing curiosity to a recognised form of economic evidence. The company has also added AI-driven products on top of the underlying data layer.

Education

University of Southern California

M.S.

VIT University

B.Tech

No source names the field of study for either degree, so none is recorded.