UnClaimedX Unveils Pass Down to Tackle India’s Silent Inheritance Crisis
Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], June 29: More than ₹1.84 lakh crore worth of financial assets remained unclaimed across India in 2025. Dormant bank accounts, forgotten insurance policies, unclaimed...
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
- 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.
Building Pass Down
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
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
