Wealthtech Startup BankSathi Secures Funding From Kotak Securities, Others

B2B Wealthtech startup BankSathi has secured $4 Mn in a fresh funding round from Kotak Securities, Lets Venture, We Founder Circle, Hem Securities and Inflection Point Ventures. 

Recur Club, Liquiloans, Abakkus’ Sunil Singhania, CRED’s Kunal Shah, Innov8’s Dr Ritesh Malik, Asian Markets’ Kailash Biyani, ClassPlus’ Mukul Rastogi & Bhaswat Agarwal, Mamaearth’s Varun Alagh, India Juris’ Sameer Rastogi, EKI Energy’s Manish Dabkara, and MS Fincap’s Mukund Modi also participated in the funding round. 

Including the current funding, BankSathi has raised $5.5 Mn funding in total to date. 

The development comes about 15 months after BankSathi secured INR 4 Cr funding from Hem Angels, TREAD’s Dinesh Godara, StudyBase’s  Anuj & Aditya and Freshokartz’s Rajendra Lora.

Founded by Jitendra Dhaka and Sandeep Kaler in 2020, the Bengaluru-based startup helps financial advisors find apt financial products for their businesses.

Explaining the process, the startup informed it uses algorithms to recommend financial products to financial advisors for their customers residing in Tier-2 cities and beyond. It provides recommendations based on customers’ profiles and past transactions. 

“People generally rely on their networks for recommendations, particularly when it comes to significant financial services. As a result, our distribution network of vetted agents provides the much-needed security to customers,” Jitendra Dhaka, founder and CEO, BankSathi said. 

The startup offers suggestions in multiple financial services including bank accounts, credit cards, loans, demat accounts and insurance policies. 

In the last three months, it claims to have hired top-level executives and further decides to hire more such executives. It is also looking to add three regional languages to the existing five languages on its mobile app.

It has partnered with more than 60 financial institutions including HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, IDFC First, SBI, Kotak Mahindra Bank and Bank of Baroda. It shared that it has lately got IRDAI’s approval for an insurance license and thus, plans to offer insurance services to customers in Tier-2 and less developed regions of the country.

“We use technology to reduce mis-selling of financial products. Our vision is to build technology that reduces physical work and helps financial institutions shift to digitalisation. So far, we have been successful to implement it and a few financial institutions are also adopting it for financial products distribution,” said Sandeep Kaler, CTO and cofounder of BankSathi.

Further, the startup aims to empower 10 Mn financial advisors and deliver services to more than 50 Mn customers in the next five years. It also claims that its advisor base has grown by 40X since its inception and enabled these investors to earn over INR 6 Mn by serving more than 3 Mn customers across 18K pin codes. 

According to the startup it has clocked an annualised revenue of $10 Mn.

Talking about the current fundraising round, it plans to use the fresh funds for product development, streamlining operations, expand its network of agents and grow geographically.

In India, it faces competition from the likes of OneCode, GroMo, EarnWealth Solutions and PaisaGrowth, among others. 

According to an Inc42 fintech report, India’s fintech sector is set to become a $1.3 Tn sector by 2025. Of this, wealthtech, which is a subsector of fintech segment, is anticipated to grow by 44% to become a $28 Bn space by the forecasted period.