Groww is a startup that was established in 2016 by four individuals, Lalit Keshre, Harsh Jain, Ishan Bansal, and Neeraj Singh- all of whom were Flipkart employees. Together, these four decided to quit their jobs to work towards a venture that made the act of investing more convenient and took into account the user experience.

They came up with Groww and by 2017, operations were in full swing. In this article, you will learn about what Groww is and how it started, its investors, and of course, about the founders of Groww.

The CEO of Groww, Lalit Keshre is responsible for all business-related aspects and is mainly in charge of ensuring that customers have a wonderful experience at Groww.

Before venturing out and building this startup, Lalit used to work at Flipkart as a senior product manager. In fact, he was behind the launch of Flipkart Quick as well as Flipkart Marketplace. He graduated from IIT Bombay and in his earlier days, Lalit also founded a learning agency called Eduflix. Moreover, he had been a team member at Ittiam Systems, showing the amount of experience he had as an individual.

At Groww, Harsh Jain, COO and the Co-founder is responsible for the Growth and Business at Groww. Before he co-founded Groww, he used to work at Flipkart as part of the project management team.

Surprisingly, Groww is not Harsh’s first startup. In the past, he has also co-founded a startup related to story-telling. Like Lalit, Harsh graduated from IIT Delhi- he has a B-Tech in Electrical Engineering, along with a Masters in Information and Communication Engineering. He then went on to study product management and marketing as his MBA from UCLA School of Management.

At Groww, Neeraj works as the head of the product development department and he is also involved in customer research. Neeraj is known to be a dedicated engineer, responsible solution developer, and a brilliant coder. At Flipkart, he worked as the engineering manager. He was also responsible for building the Flipkart customer returns and refund system.

Neeraj graduated from ITM with a BE degree in Information Technology and holds a PG diploma in Advanced Computing from CDAC.

At Groww, Ishan is responsible for the finances. When at Flipkart, he was working as a corporate developer. At Naspers, he was responsible for handling corporate development and M&A.

Ishan holds a graduate degree from BITS Pilani, has an MBA from XLRI in Finance, and is a CFA charter holder, making him a highly qualified individual.

Groww’s Background

The founders of Groww, after keeping their own experience in mind and talking to family friends, and acquaintances, felt that in India, the process of investing in financial products was very difficult, complicated, and confusing. Their research showed that 200 million individuals in India had some form of income that could be invested, there were only 20 million people who were willing to invest.

That is what Groww aimed to do- It provided people with the support system they needed, along with all the important data and resources that were needed to safely invest.

Of course, the founders took their fair share of time to understand their audience and figure out how to maximize user experience. Moreover, real-time experiments were carried out so that Groww could focus on how people felt and what they really needed. Their main aim was to provide users with the best experience. Moreover, since users would be investing hard-earned savings into their venture, the team had to ensure not to disappoint them and to deliver a secure product that did not cause disappointment.

By 2017, Groww established itself as a direct mutual fund distribution agency and in a short span of one year, it became one of the most renewed mutual fund investment agencies in the whole country.

As users continue to grow, new stocks were added by 2020. In the same year, GROWW introduced digital gold, EFTs, Intraday Trading, and IPOs. They have continued to be incredibly successful, so much so that Groww has more than 1.5 crore users in more than 900 countries across India, all of whom rely on the platform for their investments.

Funding

Investors who have been a part of the fintech space believe in Groww’s vision of democratizing investing opportunities in India. 

In the Series D round in April 2021, Groww managed to make $83 million. The fundraising campaign was led by Tiger Global Management and Groww’s existing investors were invited to join. This included Sequoia Capital India, Ribbit Capital, YC Continuity, and Propel Venture Partners.

Groww was able to raise $6.2 million in January 2019 as part of Series A that was funded by Sequoia India. Moreover, Propel Venture Partners and Kauffman Fellows also found their way into Groww’s investment rounds.

Future Plans

The future seems very bright for Groww. It has plans to launch deposits, US stocks, sovereign gold bonds, Futures, and Options, as well as many more derivative products in the near future.

Ever since it was established, Groww has been interested in the financial education content. They plan that in the following two years, they will be able to introduce some financial education initiatives that will help millennials become a part of the financial market with ease.