Noida-based Providential Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd, which runs mass market mutual fund investment platform Nivesh.com, has raised an angel round from VCCircle founder PV Sahad, former head of investor relations at Infosys Sandeep Shroff and Right Global Infosolutions CEO Rahul Gupta.
The omni-channel platform, founded in August last year by Anurag Garg and Sridhar Srinivasan, mainly targets Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. The company started operations in January this year.
Prior to starting Nivesh.com, Garg co-founded mutualfundsindia.com, which was acquired by rating agency ICRA. Srinivasan helmed the India unit of investment research platform Visible Alpha.
“The mutual fund industry has grown 17 times in the last 15 years. However, the top five states, accounting for only 23% of population and 35% of the GDP, have contributed 71% of the total assets under management while the rest of the country with 77% population accounted only for 29%. There is a huge gap and our mission is to take mutual funds as an investment product to every nook and corner of country,†Garg said.
The firm will work with a network of partners across cities while customer on-boarding and transactions will be online, he added. In line with its future plans to tap the mass market of retail investors, the platform will be available in local languages, starting with Hindi in a few months, the company said.
Sahad, who founded The VCCircle Network (which runs this web site) in 2005 and sold the company to global media and information giant News Corp in 2015, has mentored several entrepreneurs. Gupta is former president of private equity firm Sonoma Management Partners and has invested in eight startups so far. Shroff is now chief executive at Silicon Valley-based CFO outsourcing firm MyStartupCFO.