Noida-based Nivesh.com, a distributor of mutual fund products, has raised $600,000 (Rs 4.3 crore at current exchange rate) funding led by Pune-based existing investor Windrose Capital.
Nivesh.com, owned and operated by Providential Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd, said in a statement it will use the funds it has raised to expand to new geographies and increase its customer base in existing markets. The funds will also be used to enhance the startup’s technological infrastructure and recruit talent.
“The repeat investment by Windrose Capital in our latest funding round is a validation of our model and a huge boost in our mission to take financial products to the masses,” Nivesh.com founder Anurag Garg said.
He added that Nivesh.com is growing at 200% annually.
Windrose Capital managing partner Rohit Goyal said the firm was confident in its investment because Nivesh.com had built a “trustworthy ecosystem for first-time investors”.
Nivesh.com was founded in 2016, and says its platform is built to serve marginal investors from Tier-II and Tier-III cities who have limited or no access to formal public financial markets. Small institutions and agents use its platform to facilitate mutual fund investments.
In June last year, Nivesh.com raised seed funding of Rs 3 crore (around $450,000) from online deal-making firm LetsVenture and a clutch of angel investors including then Google India managing director Rajan Anandan and former Infosys global sales head Basab Pradhan.
Before that, in 2017, the startup raised an angel round of funding from VCCircle founder Sahad PV, former head of investor relations at Infosys Sandeep Shroff and Right Global Infosolutions CEO Rahul Gupta.
Windrose Capital was founded in 2014. It has been investing in digital-first early- to mid-stage startups. It has made over a dozen other investments through its proprietary and private multi-family corpus. Some of its earlier investments include Idea Forge, Favcy and Precily.
In November this year, the Pune-based firm said that it had marked the initial close of its debut fund that seeks to invest up to $30 million (around Rs 213 crore) in early-stage startups in the country. It expects to mark the final close of the fund by the end of the year, Goyal said at the time.
Other digital-first investment platforms that have raised money in recent times include Groww, which in September this year raised $21.4 million (around Rs 152.5 crore) in a Series B funding round led by Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Ribbit Capital. That month, the United States-based investment firm Tiger Global Management invested $25 million (around Rs 177.42 crore) in online stock brokerage Upstox.