Stock investment platform Groww’s latest $83m Series D round catapulted it into the unicorn club.
The latest entrant into India’s unicorn club, Groww almost tripled its previous valuation from seven months ago.
The round – which brings its total fundraise to $142m to date – was led by Tiger Global, with participation from Sequoia Capital India, Ribbit Capital, YC Continuity and Propel Venture Partners. The round comes after the FinTech firm raised $30m led by Y Combinator in September last year.
The startup will use funds to expand its product suite, hire talent and deploy funds towards boosting financial awareness. To add on, the company plans to launch a slew of financial education initiatives aimed at millennials and expand the market for financial services in the next two years.
Founded in 2017 by former Flipkart employees Lalit Keshre, Harsh Jain, Neeraj Singh and Ishan Bansal, Groww targets millennial investors and provide products like stocks, mutual funds and other asset classes. The company, claiming over 15 million users two-thirds of whom are first-time investors, provides a paperless investment process to enable millennials to buy stocks and invest in mutual funds, ETFs, IPOs and gold.
As a mutual fund distributor, Groww has been opening more than 250,000 new systematic investment plans every month, it said.
Commenting on this achievement, Keshre said, “We started Groww almost five years back to make investing accessible and transparent to everyone in India. We have made good progress, but it feels we have just got started. Only around 25 million people in India are investing in stocks or mutual funds. We will continue working to change this. The new capital will help us invest in new products, acquire talent and continue building our financial education platforms.”
Expressing confidence in the firm’s growth, Tiger Global Management partner Scott Shleifer said, “We are excited to partner with Groww as they help democratize access to investing in India. We believe the market opportunity is huge and expect Groww will have many years of efficient growth ahead.”
In the wake of the Covid-19-induces lockdown, retail investing in stocks, mutual funds, bonds and IPOs has been picking up. Apart from Groww, other online investing platforms such as Zerodha, IndWealth, Cube Wealth, ET Money, Upstox and Paytm Money saw a sharp rise in the number of users, as well as the number of transactions in the last year as more people sought to diversify their investments amidst the ongoing pandemic.
With this round, Groww became the fourth Indian startup this week to join the unicorn club after Meesho, CRED and PharmEasy, proving that the ecosystem is ripe for more unicorns to be born.
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