Gurgaon-based startup Sqrrl Fintech has raised USD 1 million in their Pre-Series A funding round from Equanimity Venture Fund. Launched in March 2017 by trio Samant Sikka, Dhananjay Singh and Sanjeev Sharma the app is aimed at helping young Indians to build the habit of savings and investments.
Post this funding round, Rajesh Sehgal, the Managing Partner of Equanimity Investments, will join the board of Sqrrl Fintech.
It allows users to invest in high performing (zero-commission) mutual funds based on their investment needs, risk horizons & goals. Further, with a feature to round up your spending to INR 100 or INR 500, Sqrrl automatically invests the leftover amount, making it extremely convenient for the young generation to save while they spend.
Sqrrl is a mobile app only app based investment platform available in 9 Indian languages. Sqrrl now has customers across 500+ cities in India and is aspiring to reach to 5 million+ customers over next 5 years.
The total Assets under Management (AUM) to GDP ratio of India stands at a mere 10%, way below the global average of 55%. With an abysmally low share in financial saving – 2.9%, mutual fund industry has huge potential for growth. “Targeting the rapidly growing segment of 300 million smartphone users, Sqrrl seeks to use the growth capital to reach out to a million users across India by 2019” said Co-founder Sanjeev Sharma.
The funds will be used to pursue aggressive growth and add to its product and tech prowess. Sqrrl aims to invest in new age technologies, particularly machine learning and artificial intelligence, to sharpen its product recommendation and further smoothen its on-boarding process.
We have made a good start by building a personalized recommendation engine using analytics and data science. Further, we plan to employ machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve the recommendation engine, customer experience and security,” said Dhananjay Singh, Co-founder at Sqrrl.
Samant Sikka, CEO & Co-founder at Sqrrl said, “India is at an inflexion point where tech-in-fin can solve for our biggest problems of access and efficient distribution and significantly contribute to India’s GDP. At Sqrrl, we are reimagining the financial services template for the young Indians. With a compelling proposition and obsessive focus on delivering best-in-class customer experience, we aspire to ultimately morph into a digital bank.”