Bharosa Club, a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA), has today announced that it has successfully raised an undisclosed amount in its bridge financing round. In the current round, the funding was raised from the company’s management team as well as few other individuals.
The company plans to utilise this fresh influx of capital to reach its near term goal of 10,000 members and Rs. 1,000 crores assets under advice. The funding will also be used to enhance its product offering, expand its network and reach a million member milestone.
As per the statement released by the company, it is currently in talks with investment banks to represent Bharosa Club in raising a series A round of over Rs. 15 crores by the end of this financial year.
Bharosa Club is an online robo-advisory platform which aims to replace bad, commission-based selling with honest, unbiased, transparent and affordable financial advice plus execution. It is actively targeting customers across the spectrum, starting with mutual funds.
The firm was started by ex-PayPal founding team member Sanjay Bhargava. It claims to be the only Investment Advisory company which has an open-to-public algorithm, which in turn helps investors to identify good performing mutual funds. It is currently also working with the mutual fund industry to increase penetration from low single digits to high double digits by getting new users to try mutual funds. For this, the company is also in talks with several institutions for Financial Wellness Programs for their respective constituents.
As for the targeted market, Bhargava believes that the market is universal as the club aims to bring financial freedom and security to all and sundry, be it a poor household or a conglomerate in India. The club aims to create a community of like-minded people bound together by their desire to improve their well-being.
The company is also in final stages of developing a product specifically for HNIs and serious mutual fund investors. Commenting on this, Sanjay Bhargava, said,
We want to show our impact through numbers. In our testing phase, in some cases we have created an alpha of over 20% over a 3 year back tested period. While this will vary from investor to investor; the impact that great advice can have on large portfolios can be tremendous.
The company has 3 pricing plans. One is called ‘Basic’ – which is free for 1st time investors. Another is ‘Premium’ – which is a paid plan for regular MF investors and the last one is named ‘Pro’ – for serious MF investors. The company says that in future, it will look to get savings for its premium and pro members by negotiating group insurance starting with term life.
