Retail Investment Platform Groww Raises $1.6M in Pre-Series A Funding

Investment platform, Groww has raised $1.6 million in pre-series A round of funding from Insignia Ventures Partners, Lightbridge Partners, Kairos and others, with participation from previous investors Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori. Groww will use the funds for further strengthening technology and build scalable growth channels. Y Combinator is also an investor in the startup.
Launched in April 2017, Groww offers Direct plans for mutual funds and a seamless and transparent approach to investing via a mobile app and web platform. The Android app is one of the fastest growing mutual fund apps on Google Play. Groww, partners with all 34 fund houses. In long term, the company will be launching more financial products and value-added services.
Lalit Keshre, cofounder and CEO, says, “We challenge ourselves every day with how to keep Groww simple for new investors, while adding more products and functionalities. Our long term goal is to make anything related to finance extremely simple and transparent for users while providing them the best user experience”.
Tan Yinglan, founding managing partner, Insignia Ventures Partners, says, “Groww is the right idea, at the right time, to enable and empower a new generation of investors in India to build their financial future at a younger age, and we’re excited to be on the ground floor of this sea change. The Groww team are doing a great job building a trusted relationship with customers with its simple and convenient product offering. Over time it’s not hard to imagine that Groww will layer on more products and services to become the Amazon of Financial Services”.
There are only 20 million investors in India while more than 200 million have investable income. The only way to bring the next 180 million onboard is by making investing very simple and democratic. Groww does this by making the entire process, including KYC, paperless and seamless. A new user can come and start investing within few minutes.
To simplify investing for the new users, Groww is building unique communities that encourage knowledge-based decisions. These investor communities let users ask, discuss and share insights about financial products with each other. Users find this interactive mode of communication very useful as it brings confidence in investment decision-making when inputs come from several experienced resources.
Groww is the brainchild of ex-Flipkart employees Lalit Keshre, Harsh Jain, Neeraj Singh and Ishan Bansal, who started the company in April 2017, by bringing together their and expertise in engineering, product management, finance and e-commerce.