The Man Closing India's Other Independence Gap

It usually starts with a phone call.

For Ajay Lakhotia, it was his father's. Buy railway stocks, he said. They'll become 3x in a year. The tip had travelled from a friend on a morning walk, through a father, to a son who had spent two decades in investment banking and venture capital. And here is the part Lakhotia admits with a laugh: he bought them too.

"Take a step back and understand the phenomenon of investing," he says. "You realise it is perhaps the largest consensus-based social commerce activity in India." A nation of 1.4 billion people making its most consequential investment decisions the way it picks a wedding caterer — on hearsay.

That call, repeated in crores of Indian homes every day, became the problem he decided to spend his next decade solving.

THE GAP NOBODY WAS MEASURING

The numbers were never a mystery. SEBI's 2025 investor survey, covering over 90,000 households across 400 cities and 1,000 villages, found that 63 per cent of Indian households are aware of at least one securities product. Just 9.5 per cent participate. Seventy-four per cent of non-investors blame the complexity of markets for non-participation. Fifty-one per cent simply don't trust the system.

India, in other words, had solved access to stock markets. Online KYC, cheap data, zero-brokerage apps. On execution, the country became world-class. What it never built was judgment of what to execute and why.

"You cannot fix a shortage of investment judgment with a faster execution button," Lakhotia says. It is the sentence that explains everything he has built since.

THE FULL CIRCLE

He came to it the long way. Born into a Kolkata business family where the dinner table doubled as a boardroom, he started two ventures out of college that failed fast. The third ran for eight years and gave him an exit. Then that led to Capgemini in London, an MBA at ISB, investment banking at ICICI, and over a decade in the venture capital industry deploying millions of dollars through Vertex Venture - Temasek’s VC Arm and Fosun RZ Capital. He has been an early entrant in the venture capital industry since 2011, shaping the landscape in India.

He was, by any reading, an insider to institutional investing. Which is precisely what made the arithmetic unbearable for him: less than one per cent of the country — fund managers, bankers, investors like him — was deciding where the other 99 per cent's savings went.

THE ROOM WHERE IT CHANGED

In November 2019, he figured no budding founder in his circle was looking to build an investment advisory platform, the kind already thriving in the US and Europe.

In the days that followed, he got a challenge.

Less than 3.5 per cent of India invested at the time, against 60 per cent-plus in the West, the Moguls of India’s fintech ecosystem pointed out. Can you narrow down this gap?

He went back to the drawing board. Four months later, on 13 January 2020, he registered the business with a commitment on seed funding from investor friends on a paper plan. In March, the lockdown arrived and all paper plans vanished.

But that couldn’t stop him. He proceeded to bootstrap it and launched it unglamorously on just two B-school campuses — IIM Bangalore and IIM Calcutta.

MAKING TRUST THE PRODUCT

The word spread the way good things do in India — through cousins, hostels and WhatsApp — and by 2021 a harder problem surfaced. Unregistered tipsters were everywhere, and a Telegram group could vanish overnight with its screenshots of fake trade and its followers' savings.

Lakhotia's read was contrarian. The tipsters weren't the disease; they were the symptom of a country with roughly one certified expert for every 16,000 investors and nowhere to find them.

So StockGro went knocking on the doors of SEBI-registered research analysts. As of March 31, 2026 over 137 of them publish over 2,000 trade calls a month on the platform — entry price, exit price, and the reasoning behind every call. And every single call is permanent. Nothing can be deleted or quietly edited. Accuracy is tracked and shown.

"We are the class monitors, and they are the students," he says. An analyst's record, for the first time in India, defines the analyst’s popularity.

THE RESEARCH ANALYST IN EVERY POCKET

The last barrier was speed. Institutional-grade research sat behind Bloomberg terminals; general-purpose AI, when he tested it, cheerfully answered should I buy Titan today using a month-old article and a long-dead price. Neither were built to solve the problem of a retail investor - and perhaps no one cared. So StockGro built Stoxo — an AI research engine trained on a decade of Indian market data and the live research of 130+ experts. Stoxo now returns the kind of investing insights that once took hours in shorter time frames.

The effect is quietly radical. Forty-five per cent of India's new investors now come from Tier-2 towns and beyond; 56 per cent are under 30. Only five per cent of Indian households prefer financial content in English. But StockGro’s ecosystem of education, research, expert-advice and trade backtesting has gone to various colleges, and 35 million users. In essence, a lesson on smart investing has essentially travelled to every nook and corner of the country.

A VENTURE FROM INDIA

In 2019, every venture capitalist in the country, Lakhotia included, was importing American and Chinese playbooks. He built from an Indian observation instead — a community discussing life decisions on morning walks and WhatsApp groups. Today Dubai's exchange has asked to run this Indian playbook in the Gulf.

"I have dedicated the next decade to making intelligent investments accessible so everyone can grow their wealth smartly," he says. Seventy-nine years after the country won one kind of freedom, the second kind is still being planted — household by household, question by question.

Note to the Reader: This article has been produced on behalf of the brand by HT Brand Studio and does not have journalistic/editorial involvement of Mint.