Silicon Valley has a type. It likes its prodigies cryptic, its founders mythic, and its engineers allergic to eye contact. So when a former Visa, Amazon, and Meta executive starts talking about dignity, you almost expect a pitch deck to fall out of his pocket.
But Anshuman Chowdhury is not interested in mythology. He is building something slower, quieter, and, in its own way, more subversive. A3Z AI, his post-corporate brainchild, is a fintech infrastructure platform. The phrase sounds cold, but the product is anything but. Chowdhury is trying to train artificial intelligence (AI) to care—or at least to stop embarrassing itself when asked to understand people it was never built for.
Mentorship Without the Spotlight
He has mentored over 50 startup founders. Most of them did not attend Stanford, many of them never saw a term sheet, and some of them came from villages with no banks. Chowdhury does not collect mentees. They find him in odd corners of the internet, and he talks them through their worst moments with alarming steadiness.
He does not tell them to raise faster or pivot harder. He asks them who they are trying to help. Then he sits in the mess with them until they find the answer. One founder recalls panicking after a partner backed out mid-launch. Chowdhury's text? "You're not late. You're early for the next thing."
At Meta, he led product strategy and development for the company's core identity infrastructure, building the foundation for how over 2.6 billion people and millions of businesses interact across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. His work enabled seamless, trusted cross-app experiences, powering key features such as business onboarding, account recovery, payments, and digital identity—supporting the rollout of avatars, NFTs, and wallets as part of Meta's broader shift toward immersive platforms.
At Amazon, he shaped the product vision for financial infrastructure within the advertising division—designing billing, spend attribution, and revenue integrity systems that now underpin a $30+ billion business.
At Visa, he brought innovation into a highly regulated environment, co-leading the development of merchant onboarding APIs adopted by global partners including Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft—streamlining integration while ensuring compliance at scale.
Context Is the Product
The premise sounds deceptively simple: people should not be excluded from finance because they lack the right paperwork. That's it. No whitepapers, no buzzwords, no predictions about the metaverse. Just a focus on trust, modeled in code.
A3Z AI builds behavioral credit algorithms. These are not the credit scores you find on bank apps. They are real-time, explainable systems that read human intent rather than regurgitate past debt. In early pilots, Chowdhury's team saw four times the approval rate in populations considered too risky by bureau-only models.
"You cannot keep measuring people by the systems that failed them," he says. "You need new signals and a different ear."
His version of credit evaluates how people handle volatility, keep promises, and make financial decisions when options are few. The algorithm has been tested in prop-tech onboarding, youth sports sponsorship, and cross-border identity workflows. It works not because it is perfect but because it is honest.
Everything is auditable. No black boxes. No AI mysticism. If someone is declined, the system explains why. If someone is accepted, the explanation holds up in meetings with compliance officers, not just machine learning engineers.
Disruption Without the Drumroll
The tech press likes drama. It wants its founders to feud on X, its valuations to hit nine zeroes, and its pitch decks to leak. Chowdhury prefers calm. His website is sparse. His LinkedIn is informative but not thirsty. There are no threads about hustle culture. No Medium essays about disruption. Just a man who once spent over two decades building corporate infrastructure, now building a new one—this time, for the invisible majority.
He filed a patent in 2025 for his dignity-first credit scoring model. The phrasing was deliberate. He did not call it efficient, smart, or secure. He called it dignity-first. This was not branding. This was a message to the systems that punished people for having no file.
The approval numbers in the United Kingdom, India, and North America don't lie. A3Z's model gets people seen. It does not use five-year-old bureau data. It uses what people are doing today—the jobs they work, the payments they make, the ways they stretch what little they have to cover what little they need.
Regulators have started to notice. So have nonprofits. Chowdhury is not racing to be famous. He is walking toward something else. Something older. A form of tech that acts like it knows people are watching.
"Financial dignity is not a feature," he says. "It's the baseline. Everything else is noise."
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