L&T Finance has opened applications for the second edition of Pitch Point, after winners from its inaugural contest secured enterprise partnerships and used feedback to refine their products.
L&T Finance has opened applications for the second edition of Pitch Point, a contest for artificial intelligence start-ups that will run ahead of RAISE’ 26, the company’s AI-focused event for the banking, financial services and insurance sector. According to the company’s announcement, the programme is aimed at early- to growth-stage firms building tools for both financial and non-financial uses, with finalists set to pitch to venture capital investors, senior L&T Finance executives and industry specialists.
The initiative is part of L&T Finance’s wider push to position itself as a technology-led retail financial services group. Debarag Banerjee, the company’s chief data and AI officer, said Pitch Point is intended not merely as a competition but as a route into enterprise collaboration, arguing that artificial intelligence is moving financial services towards more predictive decision-making. Sushma Kaushik, head of the innovation fund at Larsen & Toubro, also backed the programme, saying AI is becoming a major differentiator in the BFSI sector and praising L&T Finance for creating a forum that brings together different parts of the ecosystem.
The company points to the first Pitch Point cohort as evidence that the format can translate into commercial relationships. Arrowhead AI, an enterprise voice AI start-up, and SpoofSense, which works on digital identity verification and fraud prevention, were named the winners from a competitive field. Devanyi Gupta, chief executive of Arrowhead AI, said the competition gave the business access to senior decision-makers and helped build trust more quickly with a large organisation. Kartikeya Bhardwaj, founder of SpoofSense, said the process offered direct feedback on whether its technology could scale securely and operate in an enterprise setting.
Both winners said the exposure helped beyond the prize itself. Arrowhead AI has since become L&T Finance’s voice AI partner across several business areas, while SpoofSense said it used the feedback to refine its application programming interfaces for deepfake and liveness detection. Bhardwaj urged future applicants to treat the programme as a working partnership rather than a one-off pitch, while Gupta advised start-ups to arrive with a product that solves a clearly defined problem and can be delivered reliably after the presentation.
Applications for the current edition remain open until October 31, 2026. L&T Finance says shortlisted entrants will progress to a virtual round before five finalists are selected for the live event on December 16, 2026, at the Jio World Convention Centre in Mumbai. The company has tied the competition to a broad set of areas, including cyber security, fraud prevention, AI-driven credit scoring, regulatory technology, collections, embedded finance and agentic AI, a form of software designed to act with limited human supervision.
Disclaimer: This article is intended to inform and educate, not to recommend or endorse any financial product, investment or strategy. Please consider your own financial circumstances and seek professional advice where appropriate before making financial decisions.
