How Bhavin Turakhia is building a 'bank in a box' stack for global markets

His firm Zeta aims to enable users to run any program--credit or debit card, savings a/c, deposits, loans, on a single modern cloud native platform without having to leverage any other vendor

Bhavin Turakhia has founded four companies in the past two decades, is a billionaire and his latest venture Zeta recently became a unicorn after raising $250 million from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 at a $1.45 billion valuation. But he won’t slow down. The serial entrepreneur is working 12-14 hours almost everyday, even on weekends. 

With the pandemic making it difficult for Turakhia to venture out for water sports and winter sports--a hobby he’s passionate about, he is continuously upgrading knowledge by signing up for quantum physics and statistics courses on weekends. Otherwise, you may find him studying math or molecular biology at home.

For him the biggest motivator is the moral obligation to make an impact proportionate to one’s potential. “I believe it’s my duty and obligation to make an impact and I think I still have a lot more I can do in terms of creating a large-scale impact,” he says.

Turakhia started coding at the age of 10. In 1989, when the first computer was installed in his school in Mumbai, he took to computer science like a fish takes to water. Most of his lunch hours and after school time was spent in the computer room as his family could not afford a computer for home back then. “I always knew I wanted to do something in computer science. I was also very inspired by entrepreneurs in general and read biographies of various entrepreneurs, including Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, and many more,” he says. The combined love for coding and entrepreneurship etched the path for Turakhia’s future and he went on to launch his first company Directi at the age of 17 with younger brother Divyank Turakhia. In 2014, the web presence business was sold in an all-cash transaction for about $160 million to Nasdaq-listed Endurance Group. He later founded Radix in 2012 which is currently a half a billion dollar enterprise. His third company Flock was cofounded in 2015 which competes with the likes of Slack and Microsoft Teams. 

Turakhia believes banking as a sector has not seen a complete refresh in terms of software. So he along with with Ramki Gaddipati, who has been working with Turakhia for several years, co-founded Zeta in 2015 with the goal of becoming the most dominant player providing technology to banks across the globe. He’s now focussing his energies on Zeta to make it the world's first fully modern banking technology stack in a box that can enable a bank to run to launch any product without needing any other windows. 

A typical bank needs 15-20 different systems for launching a new product. Zeta aims to provide a full stack where the customer can run any programme be it credit card, debit card, savings account, deposits, loans, on a single fully modern cloud native platform without having to leverage any other vendors. The company charges a fee per active user per month for its products to monetise the platform.

“We see this as a $200 billion industry that doesn’t have any other player now, except Zeta,” says Turakhia. 

After the latest fund raise, the goal is to expand the team in North America, and the UK and to launch in countries such as France, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Spain. Turakhia wants to take his company to 20-25 new geographies with a 250 strong sales and marketing team. On the product side the company will be adding travel and expense management and mortgages and loans on the platform. “Zeta’s modern omnistack will drive banking software upgrades catering to the digital consumer, and innovations in financial services globally,” said Munish Varma, Managing Partner, SoftBank Investment Advisers.

Zeta is also eyening profitability by 2023 and a potential IPO in five years from now.

He follows an idea which he calls the three Ps--persona, problem, product. What is the persona that you’re targeting? What is the problem that you're solving for customers? And how is your product solving it 10x better than any other product in the market? “If you have these three clear in your head, then it's a recipe for success,” he claims. 

His focus is completely on creating value, not valuation. For Turakia, even failure is a learning milestone. “Failure sounds like an absolute outcome when you stop. But if you don't stop then you technically can’t fail. Failure would be when you give up,” he says.