How UnClaimedX Is Building Pass Down to Prevent India's Unclaimed Assets Problem

Bengaluru (Karnataka) : More than ₹1.84 lakh crore worth of financial assets remained unclaimed across India in 2025. Dormant bank accounts, forgotten insurance policies, unclaimed provident funds and overlooked investments represent far more than numbers on a balance sheet. Behind many of these assets are families who either never knew they existed or lacked the information required to claim them.

Recognising the growing scale of the issue, the Government of India launched the Aapki Punji Aapka Adhikar campaign in October 2025, encouraging citizens to reclaim financial assets that rightfully belong to them.

For Bengaluru-based startup UnClaimedX, however, the problem begins much earlier.

Its founder believes India's unclaimed wealth challenge is not simply a recovery problem. It is an information continuity problem.

To address this, UnClaimedX is building Pass Down, a digital inheritance and asset continuity platform designed to help individuals securely organise their financial assets today while ensuring their families can discover, access and claim them when the need arises.

A Personal Experience That Sparked an Idea

For founder Sandeep P Gaonkar, the inspiration behind UnClaimedX came from an unexpected moment.

Following an injury that required hospitalisation last year, he found himself asking a question he had never seriously considered before.

What if something happened to me today?

Looking across the hospital room at his wife holding their young daughter, he realised that much of the financial security he had spent years building existed only inside his memory and behind a locked smartphone.

He recalls dictating his phone's unlock password from the hospital bed, recognising that if he had not recovered, his family might never know where to begin looking for his savings, investments and financial assets.

That experience fundamentally changed the way he viewed financial planning.

"I realised that building wealth is only half the responsibility," Gaonkar said. "Ensuring your family can actually find and access it is equally important."

That realisation eventually became the foundation of UnClaimedX.

Research Revealed the Problem Was Far Bigger

Rather than immediately building a product, Gaonkar wanted to understand whether his experience reflected a larger pattern.

He interviewed 86 working professionals, business owners and individuals across different age groups, ending every conversation with the same question:

"If you died today, could your family find all your savings, investments and financial assets?"

Not a single participant answered with complete confidence.

The findings revealed a consistent pattern.

• Nearly 50 per cent had disclosed less than half of their financial assets to their families.

• 34 per cent had shared nothing at all.

• Only 19 per cent had documented their financial information, mostly at the time of retirement, using notebooks, spreadsheets or free note-taking applications.

"We are managing lifelong wealth on tools that were never designed for inheritance," Gaonkar said.

Building Pass Down

Based on these insights, UnClaimedX began developing Pass Down, a digital inheritance and asset continuity platform built specifically for Indian families.

The platform enables users to securely organise financial assets, important documents and digital information in one place while assigning nominees and beneficiaries for individual assets. Users retain complete control over what information is shared and with whom during their lifetime.

If the owner passes away, Pass Down activates the company's proprietary SAFE Protocol, a structured four-stage verification process before any sensitive financial information is handed over to the designated beneficiary.

Once verification is complete, the platform helps families discover financial assets and provides institution-specific guidance to support the claim process.

Rather than replacing existing financial institutions, Pass Down aims to ensure families know what exists, where it exists and how to claim it.

Privacy by Architecture

Handling highly sensitive financial information requires trust.

To address that challenge, Pass Down is built on a zero-knowledge encryption architecture, meaning the company itself cannot access customer data.

"Even we, as a company, cannot see our customers' data," Gaonkar said. "If we can't access it, we can't profile it or monetize it."

The company says privacy has been embedded into the platform's architecture from the beginning, allowing users to remain in complete control of their information.

Building a platform around zero-knowledge encryption and secure information exchange requires deep engineering expertise. Alongside founder Sandeep P Gaonkar, Raj Kumar, a mobile platform specialist, and Vinay KK, a backend and security specialist, each bring more than 12 years of enterprise technology experience and contribute to the core architecture and development of Pass Down.

Looking Beyond Consumers

While Pass Down serves individuals and families, UnClaimedX's long-term vision extends beyond consumer software.

The company plans to build an institutional infrastructure layer that enables banks, insurance companies and legal firms to receive verified notifications that help reduce fraud while streamlining inheritance and claim processes.

Over time, the objective is to shorten claim timelines, simplify family access to financial assets and reduce the volume of wealth that eventually becomes unclaimed.

"India has built world-class infrastructure for creating and managing wealth," Gaonkar said. "The next challenge is building the infrastructure that ensures this wealth reaches the families it was always meant for."

Preparing for Public Launch

UnClaimedX is currently in closed beta and plans to publicly launch Pass Down in July 2026.

The company is simultaneously raising a seed round to accelerate product development, strategic partnerships and market expansion.

As India's financial ecosystem continues to mature, digital wealth is growing faster than traditional inheritance systems can adapt.

For UnClaimedX, the opportunity lies not only in helping families recover forgotten assets, but in preventing tomorrow's unclaimed assets from being created in the first place.

About the Founder

Sandeep P Gaonkar is the Founder and CEO of UnClaimedX Private Limited. With more than 13 years of experience across product, design, sales and marketing, including over five and a half years leading product initiatives at Dhiway, India's first tokenisation and blockchain-anchored data assurance network, he has worked on technologies spanning digital trust, data privacy and secure information exchange. Inspired by a personal experience that exposed the challenges families face in accessing financial assets, he founded UnClaimedX to build the digital infrastructure for passing down wealth information.

About UnClaimedX

UnClaimedX is a Bengaluru-based fintech and legal tech startup building digital inheritance and asset continuity infrastructure for India. Its flagship product, Pass Down, enables individuals to securely organise their financial assets while ensuring secure, structured and verified access for their families when it is needed most.

Website: www.unclaimedx.com

Work with us: [email protected]