dezerv., an “expert” investment technology platform, has raised $ 7 million in a seed funding round coded by Elevation Capital and Matrix Partners India, with the participation of renowned 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 working Indian professionals invest like experts by providing an integrated portfolio approach combined with expert advice.
The platform will help users take calculated risks to maximize returns with the right portfolio mix and also unlock access to new asset classes, currently available only to high net worth individuals, such as high yield cured bonds and startups. high-growth emerging markets.
“We realized that many successful working professionals don’t have the time, inclination or bandwidth to be able to allocate and create their own portfolios. So what we did was say that 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 modern portfolio theory to create portfolios of multiple assets and instruments, which are offered digitally online. And with these portfolios, the goal is to optimize and maximize performance 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 of dezerv.
“The second thing we said there was that there is a game that is an interest among users to invest in alternatives, in pre-IPO companies, in startups and high quality bonds, but there is not enough diligence or review on these before they recommended. So we said that we want to play that fiduciary role, where we will do diligence and review these types of opportunities and offer them to our clients, “he added.
According to Vaibhav Porwal, co-founder of dezerv., The platform differs from other fintech players in that it does not rely too heavily on historical data to make its recommendations.
“When we designed our integrated portfolio, the first thing we wanted to be sure of was not to be overly influenced by historical data. Therefore, experience overlap 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 by invitation only.
The company plans to use the funds to build a strong team, launch and scale its investment technology product platform, and define the investment experience for professionals working in India.
“The only thing we want to do is build a very strong and scalable technological infrastructure to be able to offer this, we believe that for a platform, which is managing money, it is important to have a very strong technological infrastructure, which is secure and provides a high experience. quality to the user. So that is one of the biggest uses of this capital. The second great use of this capital is to deepen our investment experience, we believe that we should deepen the investment team even more. And the third is mainly to convey our message So we are doing a lot of work to educate users on how to have the right financial journey, the right kind of approach to investing, “said Jethwani.
