Mutual funds platform Kuvera raises $250,000 from angel investors

New Delhi: Kuvera, an online platform for mutual fund investments, has raised $250,000 from angel investors for product expansion and growth, it said on Saturday.

Investors in the round include Baskar Subramanian, co-founder of Amagi Media Labs, Saket Kumar, managing director at Swank Capital, Gaurav Suri, managing director at Livermore Capital, and Ankit Kesarwani from New Vernon Investment Management.

“This capital will go towards deepening our offerings and to double the size of our technology team. We see opportunities to build more value-added services for our users to make their financial lives easier,” Kuvera co-founder and chief executive Gaurav Rastogi said.

Kuvera is an online wealth management platform operated by Bengaluru-based Arevuk Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd. It lets retail users invest in “direct-only” mutual fund schemes from 34 asset management companies.

Growing internet and smartphone penetration in India has enabled the growth of a slew of online financial services platforms over recent years.

While large platforms like PolicyBazaar and BankBazaar offer a host of products like insurance, investment schemes, loans and several allied services, a number of platforms specifically target the mutual funds segment. These include Scripbox, FundsIndia and Wishfin.

Kuvera offers only direct schemes—mutual fund plans that do not involve broker commissions—and competes with Zerodha in this sub-category.

Since launching the online site in October 2017, Kuvera said it had grown to a user base of 15,000 and had over Rs250 crore in assets under management.

“Kuvera brings together the promise of low-cost intelligent solution to investments, transparency around commissions and removal of conflicts of interest while leveraging the trend in financialization of savings and quantum jump in internet penetration. I’m excited to support the idea and the team,” said Kesarwani from New Vernon Investment Management, a US-based investment firm.

Kuvera was founded in 2016 by bankers Rastogi and Neelabh Sanyal. Rastogi was earlier a portfolio manager at Morgan Stanley and Sanyal was a vice-president with Axis Capital. Mayank Sharma joined as the third co-founder in 2017 and is currently head of technology at Kuvera.