We have raised $2.5M to build stellar personal finance products for India
tl;dr: We have raised a seed investment of $2.5M to support our vision of building a remarkable ecosystem of personal finance products for India. Join us to help build it.
It’s an odd realisation to unlock your phone and launch into any one of the 500 available Indian bank apps, investments apps, tax apps and find how different they are from the rest of what you use on your phone.
While your app to find stays (Airbnb), your favourite social media app (Instagram/Twitter), your favourite app to order food from (Swiggy/Zomato), the apps that help you get your daily work done (Slack/Figma/GitHub), are breaking boundaries of user experience and delight, apps that cater to a core part of your life and well being - your finances, are still stuck in a time way back than what we have progressed to. This is what we want to solve.
“We accept the apps we think we deserve.”
With the very same goal, we announced Fold 2 years ago. We were a very small team then, we were only one and half years into the journey with our very first venture - Devfolio. Bootstrapped and hungry we saw an opportunity to solve a collective pet peeve of not only our team but the entire country’s. What we would soon realise is how different and complicated stepping into the Fintech world without experience, connections and most importantly a monetary reserve is going to be. Plus the pandemic that followed soon after, didn’t help much.
After working in stealth for a year, building a team and learning new things, we had to put Fold on pause because of reasons beyond our control.
Fold was born out of a late-night discussion between Shakti Goap (our Founder and CEO whom we lost to Covid in 2021) and team. From the very moment Shakti conveyed this new idea to our team, to us working on the brand and vision, to the website launching and the waitlist growing way faster than our expectations, to the time in between and the day we decided to put everything on pause, we were on fire. Each call with our potential users gave a new boost to the team, even when the possibilities of things going live amidst the pandemic was dwindling.
As aforementioned, the day did come when we had to stop. But that was then, this is now. Today we are happy to announce that we have raised $2.5M to continue working on Fold. Sharing this today fills us with enormous amounts of gratitude towards every minuscule event that transpired to make this happen, to us being given a chance to finish what we started.
The funding will help us in all the ways funds help an ambitious young startup. It’ll help us in building a core team of world-class engineers, designers and problem solvers. It’ll help in hiring folks from the financial ecosystem (costly!) who can help us navigate the legal landscape. Above all, a good reserve of funds will help us in providing everyone who joins us best in class culture, tools and a chance to solve finances for the people without worrying about their own.
To be honest, we could have done without this announcement, continue building and eventually launch. But the reason behind this blog post is not only to share good news but to find people who can join us in our journey. And if you have made it this far in the post, identify with the problem and have something you think you can contribute — engineering, design, research, management, or anything else, we would love to hear from you - join@fold.money
Changing, or even attempting to change the personal finance landscape of India is a long hard task, and we have only just begun. Small steps. Our entire team’s collective knowledge of finance is same as the country’s average, enough to get by but mostly deplorable. Thanks to school, we might need help in doing taxes, hardly ever budget, save and buy stocks like rolling a dice but we know who the first Mughal emperor was. At Fold, we take our naivety about finances as a power that we will use to make something that will account for the lack of personal finance education and know-how.
All of what’s written aside, we just want to build something good with good people.
