Invest-tech platform dezrve. raises $7 million in seed funding round

The seed funding round was co-led by Elevation Capital and Matrix Partners India, with participation from investors such as Whiteboard Capital and Blume Founders Fund

dezrve., an invest-tech platform, raised $7 million in a seed funding round co-led by Elevation Capital and Matrix Partners India, with participation from investors such as Whiteboard Capital and Blume Founders Fund. This round also featured leading tech founders including Kunal Shah (CRED), Ramakant Sharma (LivSpace), Asish Mohapatra & Ruchi Kalra (Ofbusiness), Vidit Aatrey & Sanjeev Barnwal (Meesho), Varun Dua (Acko),  Nitin Gupta (Uni), Anurag Sinha (OneCard), Shashvat Nakrani & Suhail Sameer (BharatPe), Revant Bhate (Mosaic) along with marquee family offices including Taparia (FamyCare), RK Kedia (Manjushree), CJ Shah and Neeraj Goenka (Texport) and leading industry professionals like Akash Saxena (Hotstar), K Rangarajan (Five Star) and Aashish Sommaiyaa (WhiteOak).

The company plans to use the funds to continue building a strong team, launching and scaling up its invest-tech product platform and re-defining the investment experience for working professionals in India.

Established in April 2021 by former IIFL Wealth Senior Managing Partners—Sandeep Jethwani, Vaibhav Porwal and Sahil Contractor—dezrve. aims to offer a platform to help Indian professionals access investment expertise. “dezrve. will leverage the digital adoption and scalable investment infrastructure of post-pandemic India, coupled with decades of our experience to bring world-class investing to Indian professionals. We are excited to launch our unique Integrated Portfolio Approach that looks beyond selecting individual mutual funds, and delivers high performing portfolios while controlling risk,” said the founders in a press statement.

dezrve. has brought together a team of experts across the investing and technology domains with the educational pedigree of globally renowned institutions like MIT, USC, IIMs and IITs. The team has high quality work experience from global companies like JP Morgan, UBS, Uber, Brookfield, Morgan Stanley and Clevertap.

Vikram Vaidyanathan, MD, Matrix India, added, “Digital-native affluent investors are on the brink of beginning their journey of building a portfolio across different asset classes. They need a solutions-focused approach designed by experts, and dezrve. aims to do just that. With their deep experience in wealth management over a decade, Sandeep, Sahil and Vaibhav are best suited to solve this problem and we're excited about partnering with them. ”

A majority of working professionals in India today lack adequate access to differentiated wealth-tech solutions and expert investing approaches. With over 15 years’ of experience each in the wealth management industry, the founders realised this market gap and launched this investing platform to disrupt the invest-tech market. As part of the founding team at IIFL Wealth, they had worked with high net worth clients to structure investing products and provide expert advisory that helped significantly grow their clients’ wealth. Moreover, Jethwani led the zero-to-one journey for IIFL One—a platform that leveraged IIFLW’s product expertise and enhanced the investing experience by providing guided expert advisory and transparent pricing. In this period, IIFL One scaled to over $3.5 billion in AUM.