dezerv., an ‘expert’ investing tech platform, has raised $7 million in a seed funding round co-led by Elevation Capital and Matrix Partners India, with participation from reputed investors such as Whiteboard Capital, Nath Ventures and Blume Founders Fund.
Given that this is a seed round, the size of the capital raised was quite substantial.
Established in April 2021 by former IIFL Wealth senior managing partners Sandeep Jethwani, Vaibhav Porwal, and Sahil Contractor, dezerv. aims to help underserved Indian working professionals invest like experts by providing an integrated portfolio approach combined with expert advisory.
The platform will help users take calculated risks to maximise returns with the right portfolio mix and also unlock access to new asset classes–currently available only to high net-worth individuals–such as curated high yielding bonds and emerging high growth startups.
“We realised that a lot of successful working professionals don’t have the time or inclination or bandwidth to be able to allocate and create their own portfolios. So what we did was we said we will create two offerings on the digital platform. The first offering is what we call the integrated portfolio approach. Now the integrated portfolio approach combines our learnings from our experience plus the modern portfolio theory to create multi asset multi instrument portfolios, which are offered digitally online. And with these portfolios, the objective is to optimize and maximize return for the client while controlling for the downside that users might see as markets fluctuate over a period of time,” said Sandeep Jethwani, Co-founder, dezerv.
“The second thing we said there was that there is a play that is an interest among users to invest in alternatives, into pre-IPO companies, into startups and high quality bonds, but there is not enough diligence or review happening on these before they are recommended. So, we said that we want to play that fiduciary role, where we will do diligence and review these kinds of opportunities and offer them to our clients,” he added.
According to Vaibhav Porwal, co-founder, dezerv., the platform differs from other fintech players as it does not overly depend on historical data for making its recommendations.
“When we designed our integrated portfolio, the first thing that we wanted to be sure of was not getting over influenced by historical data. So, therefore, the overlay of expertise is extremely important in projecting future returns. In that sense, we are different from other platforms, which are working purely on the basis of historical data,” he said.
Currently, the platform is invite-only.
The company plans to use the funds to build a strong team, launch and scale their invest-tech product platform and re-define investment experience for working professionals in India.
“The one big thing that we do want to do is build a very strong, scalable technology infrastructure to be able to deliver this, we feel that for a platform, which is managing money, it is important to have a very strong tech infrastructure, which is secure, and which provides a high quality experience to the user. So that is one of the biggest uses of this capital. The second big use of this capital is to deepen our investment expertise, we feel that we should further deepen the investment team. And the third is mainly to get our message across. So we are doing a lot of work on educating the users about having the right financial journey, the right kind of approach to investing,” said Jethwani.
This article was first published on livemint.com