Groww: This App Simplifies Investment For Millennials

Groww is an online investment platform that is meant to help out millennials and first-time investors. The platform has a well thought out design powered by buddy-like UI and UX to understand millennials and guide them. They are now in plans to expand their investment portal to stocks and acquire more users in their already existing userbase from Tier-2 and 3 cities. 

Lalit Keshre, Co-founder and CEO of Groww, in an exclusive interview with Express Computer’s Radhika Udas highlights the uniqueness of this app and what has distinguished them.

Kindly brief us about Groww and what problem in the current financial process does it solve?

Groww is a technology and data science powered company that offers a seamless and transparent approach to investing via a web platform, Android app and iOS. Currently, Groww offers zero commission investing in direct mutual fund plans and we are soon launching stock investing. 

Taking into account the experiences of our friends and families as well as our own, with purchasing financial products in India, we felt the process to be too complex and opaque. There are close to 200 million people with investible income in India, while only 20 million actively invest. Delving deeper into the reasons, we found that while the intent to shift from traditional assets to financial assets was strong, there wasn’t a single platform that ticked all the right boxes.  Working at Flipkart, we had seen how tech and high customer centricity disrupted the e-commerce industry and felt this was lacking in the investing space. All this prompted us to create a platform that was easy, transparent, reliable and provided an unmatched user experience and this is how Groww was conceptualised. We aim to make investing simple, accessible and remove all friction points that come with offline route. 

What is the exclusiveness of your startup, that’s unique from other gigantic players in the market?

Our focus from the very beginning has been to provide a safe and easy to use platform for our users that reduces all pain points of the traditional investing method. Our platform is suited to both new and experienced users. Our key differentiation lies in the customer obsession that we bring in our product and the resources we offer our users that help them make a decision by themselves. 

What kind of technologies are you using at Groww? 

Tech is at the heart of everything we do at Groww. It helps us create different investor buckets and customize the user flow accordingly. So a first time user who isn’t KYC verified will have a different experience than someone who is a repeat investor or tracking his external funds at Groww. This level of segmentation and the creation of unique user journeys is achieved by superior machine learning models that Groww uses. ML and image processing are also employed during the onboarding and KYC process for document verifications etc to reduce any room for error and make the process instant. At present,  our tech stack includes React native, Springboot, Springcloud, and a micro-services based architecture that allows Groww to scale.

On the cybersecurity front, what is Grow’s security plan? 

Investing on Groww is completely safe. We have very stringent checks in place to ensure your data and money are safe during the entire investment journey. All personal information is stored using 256-bit encryption and we do regular vulnerability scans to leave no room for error. At no given point of time do we handle your money directly. Groww is an intermediary and all transactions, be it investing or redemption of investments are routed through BSE.   

Coming to the financial perspective, are you a bootstrapped venture? If not, kindly elucidate the nature and amount of funding raised.

Recent Funding Details: $21.4Mn Series B funding round from US-based VC firm Ribbit Capital along with existing investors Sequoia India and Y Combinator also participating in the round. Groww had earlier raised a total of $8.3mn funding from various investors, led by Sequoia India. Others include Y Combinator, Insignia Venture Partners, Mukesh Bansal, Ankit Nagori, Lightbridge Partners, Kairos.

What are your immediate and longterm milestones like?

This year we are planning to go multi-product, starting with stock investing. This is in line with our mission to become the most customer-focused company for investing services in India. 

Lastly, any word of advice for budding entrepreneurs?

“Looking at the current situation, some of the user behaviours would undergo a permanent change. This might be a good time to leverage the change and build for the new world”.