Why we invested in smallcase?
This decade has seen the rise of “Robo-advisors” — automated portfolio management/investment services at a fraction of the cost of a human advisor. The US has many such platforms which have hit scale and are now valued at over $1bn each. India has also seen a number of up-starts in this space in the last few years. The key difference between the two markets, however, has been that the US has had a panoply of low-cost investment products (ETFs, index funds and the like) to be used as ingredients to build interesting robo-advisor propositions, while in India the menu of ingredients has been pretty thin, not to mention the low adoption of these kinds of products among retail investors.
That attracted us to smallcase in the first place - they were really focusing on creating interesting ingredients to create a credible low-cost portfolio investing market in India.
Broker Gateway + Investment Platform + Publisher Platform
smallcase has built a broker gateway platform which counts Zerodha, Edelweiss, HDFC Securities, 5 Paisa & Axis direct as partners (the list is growing) — this makes everything else possible
It’s innovative, low-cost, thematic & diversified portfolio of stocks (called ‘smallcases’) are striking a chord with investors. “All-weather Investing”, “Low-risk Smart-Beta”, “Electric Mobility”, “Zero Debt” and so on, are some of the interesting possibilities with smallcase — Making investing more of a ‘pull’ versus ‘push’ product.
They’re opening up their ‘Publisher Platform’ to SEBI registered Investment advisors who can then use it to create their own ‘smallcases’ and share it with the world — Democratizing Investment Advisory
WEH Ventures is a product-driven venture capital firm and from the get-go, the smallcase product held our attention and it was unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the market.
And of course, all this is based on our fundamental belief that in the longer term, passive portfolios would outperform most active funds and therefore, cost of investing should be lower than what it is currently.
As investors, we always look for a founding team that complements each other well but very rarely does the jigsaw fit so well. Business, Investment Research, and Technology are led by Vasanth Kamath, Anugrah Shrivastava, and Rohan Gupta respectively. They are incredibly ambitious and are challenging the status-quo at every step.
We are super excited to be part of this journey and glad to have Sequoia lead their latest round! Check out their platform here — www.smallcase.com
