Sequoia Capital Expands Its Fintech Play With Smallcase & Turtlemint

SUMMARY

Smallcase raised $8 Mn while Turtlemint raised $6 Mn

Sequoia Capital raised its sixth fund with a $695 Mn corpus in August this year

Overall, Sequoia has made over 200 investments in India and SEA so far

VC firm Sequoia Capital has reportedly invested $8 Mn in personal investment platform Smallcase and around $6 Mn in insurance portal Turtlemint.

Sequoia declined to comment on the development. In a telephonic correspondence, Smallcase spokesperson denied any such development to Inc42.

Smallcase is a kind of thematic investing platform, which allows an investor to invest in a portfolio of stocks based on a ‘theme’, such as ‘GST Opportunity’. It is backed by brokerage platform Zerodha, with which it also integrated for trading. The Bengaluru-based company was setup by three IIT-Kharagpur graduates – Vasanth Kamath, Anugrah Shrivastava, and Rohan Gupta in 2015.

On the other hand, Turtlemint was founded by former Quikr executives Dhirendra Mahyavanshi and Anand Prabhudesai in 2015. It had earlier raised funding from Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures. It offers clients advice based on algorithm and data analytics and connects customers to offline facilitators for insurance purchase and claims assistance.

Sequoia Capital raised its sixth fund with a $695 Mn corpus in August this year with the focus on India and South East Asia. It currently has $3.9 Bn in assets under management. With this fund, Sequoia India will double down its investments in early and growth stage startups. It is targeting technology, consumer and healthcare sectors.

With the Indian fintech sector predicted to cross $2.4 Bn by 2020, according to a report by KPMG India and NASSCOM, Sequoia has recently increased its bets on the sector. Most recently, it backed FreeCharge founder Kunal Shah’s new fintech startup Cred and online finance platform Drip Capital.

BankBazaar, Capital Float and MobiKwik are a few other leading companies in its fintech portfolio.

Overall, Sequoia has made over 200 investments in India and SEA so far. This includes notable names such as Prataap Snacks, Zilingo, Bira, Byju’s, One Championship, Zomato, Mu Sigma, Freshworks, Druva, Freecharge, Five Star Finance, Pine Labs, Go-Jek, GlobalLogic, OYO Rooms, Practo, JustDial, and Tokopedia.

Other leading investment and wealth management platforms in Indian market include names such as OroWealth, Scripbox, Fisdom and Upwardly. Recently ETMONEY and Paytm Money also joined the wealth management bandwagon while Walmart-owned Flipkart has entered the insurance division starting with mobile phones.