By Abhisekh Shah
Every year, millions of Indians open their first investment account. Retail participation in India’s capital markets is expanding structurally, and yet, for most of that history, a new investor was handed only two doors. Behind one: fragmented, do-it-yourself stock-picking. Behind the other: the rigid, opaque allocation of a mutual fund. Between them sat an obvious, unserved gap: investing that is curated and accessible, but also transparent, flexible, and built around ideas.
smallcase was built to fill that gap.
A decade on, it hasn’t just filled it; it has turned it into a category, and become the platform that category runs on. When we set out to map the defining businesses of India’s wealth-tech decade, smallcase kept surfacing not as a product, but as infrastructure.
In March 2025, we led its $50 million Series D. This is the story of why.
A category that had to be invented
Smallcase began with a deceptively simple question. Its three founders, Vasanth Kamath, Anugrah Shrivastava and Rohan Gupta, met at IIT Kharagpur and scattered into the machinery of modern finance: Vasanth at Tracxn, Anugrah at Nomura, Rohan at Goldman Sachs. What pulled them back together was a frustration they could all see in their own lives.
“What drove us was figuring out why our own network wasn’t investing,” Vasanth recalls. “The existing brands felt like they were built for a very different generation. Why was nobody speaking to our generation?”
The insight that followed looks obvious only in hindsight.
Inside institutions, professionals had always built portfolios around a strategy, an idea, a theme, but they took those portfolios to other institutions, never to retail. Yet retail investors, Vasanth argues, are precisely the ones who think that way: “If someone tells you India’s sanitaryware looks like a good bet, more people will have nicer bathroom fittings, so maybe it’s a stock to buy – that’s thematic thinking. Retail investors invest in stories. So why wasn’t there a form factor for them to participate in?”
That form factor became the smallcase: a basket of stocks assembled around a single idea, held directly in the investor’s own demat account. It replaced the single-stock gamble with a diversified portfolio, and it made the whole thing legible.
But the hard part wasn’t demand. It was the definition.
“This product didn’t really exist here,” says Vasanth. “We had to educate India about it – very first-principles, ground-up thinking on how to create a new product category.” The thematic angle was the wedge: when smallcase launched in 2016, just as GST arrived, “The GST Opportunity” basket let an investor buy a thesis rather than decode a screener. It worked so well that the product became a noun. “Most investors treated it as one unit,” he remembers. “They’d say they bought one smallcase of this, two smallcases of that”.
When your product becomes the word customers use for the category, you are no longer selling a feature. You are building a standard.
What the platform looks like today
The scale of what got built is now hard to argue with. smallcase is India’s largest model-portfolios platform. It has over 14 million investors signed up. Operating revenue grew roughly 57% to ₹106 crore in FY25, earned primarily through transaction fees from its broker partners rather than from the volatility of any single market call. This is a business compounding toward profitability on the strength of a recurring, participation-linked revenue model, not one buying growth with cash.
The clearest proof of the platform thesis is what smallcase built next. In a joint venture with Zerodha, it launched an asset-management company – Zerodha Fund House – to manufacture low-cost, direct-only index funds and ETFs. This has crossed ₹16,000 crore in AUM and over 11 lakh investors. The composition matters more than the headline: around 60% of those investors come from beyond India’s top 30 cities, and roughly one in eight is buying a mutual fund for the first time. This is not share-shifting among the already-invested; it is market expansion.
The newest layer is credit. smallcase now offers loans against mutual funds and stocks – letting an investor borrow against a portfolio at roughly 9-10%, rather than liquidating holdings or paying 16–17% on an unsecured loan – and has begun extending it through bank partnerships, including a recent digital loan-against-mutual-funds programme with South Indian Bank.
Model portfolios, an asset manager, and a credit rail — three businesses, one platform, the same investor.
From product to infrastructure
What turns a good company into a category-defining one is the willingness to keep redrawing its own boundaries. smallcase has made two structural choices we find telling.
First, it chose to be a manufacturer, not a distributor. “We’re a product manufacturer rather than a distributor,” Vasanth says. “What people aren’t seeing as much is manufacturers going directly to consumers. That’s working across the board for us.” In a market organised around layers of intermediated selling, building the product layer, and increasingly owning the direct relationship, is the harder, more durable position.
Second, it opened the platform. Having proven the product in-house, smallcase invited SEBI-registered managers to create their own smallcases and let other platforms distribute them – turning a single app into a two-sided marketplace of curated portfolios. The category it created is now being formalised into its own regulated product class; in 2024, SEBI issued a consultation paper to do exactly that. There is no stronger signal that you have built something real than a regulator writing rules for it.
Ten years in, Vasanth says: “We’re almost an incumbent now, at least by age. The hard part is breaking that and telling yourself not to think like an incumbent and push through conventional wisdom, not just in your own head but in everyone around you.”
Why We Invested
At Elev8, we back category-leading companies at the growth stage that are profitable or on a clear, near-term path to it. Businesses that have proven the model and are compounding toward durable market leadership.
smallcase sits squarely in that thesis, for five reasons:
- It created its category and leads it. smallcase isn’t competing for a slice of an existing market; it defined the model-portfolios category, remains its largest platform, and is now seeing that category codified in regulation.
- It is infrastructure, not a single bet. Distribution depth across 18 brokers, a manager marketplace, an asset-management JV, and a credit layer give it multiple, reinforcing ways to grow, with revenue tied to participation rather than to any one product cycle.
- It scales with improving economics. Over 10 million investors and ₹1.2 lakh crore transacted, alongside FY25 revenue up ~57% to ₹106 crore and an EBITDA loss cut to roughly ₹9 crore, describe a company growing on a recurring revenue base with a visible path to profitability.
- It rides a structural tailwind. India’s investing base is widening. smallcase and Zerodha Fund House’s reach, well beyond the metros, is actively bringing new investors into the market rather than merely redistributing existing ones.
- The founders are building for the decade, not the quarter. A team that invented a category, educated an ecosystem, and is now reimagining the manufacturer-to-consumer relationship is exactly the founder-market fit we underwrite.
In March 2025, we led smallcase’s $50 million Series D, alongside State Street Global Advisors, Niveshaay, Faering Capital and Arkam Ventures – a syndicate whose global institutional weight is its own validation. The round took the company’s total capital raised to nearly $120 million, and the new capital is earmarked to broaden the product stack into mutual funds, fixed income, global equities and bonds.
The next decade
India’s mutual-fund industry took three decades to reach today’s scale. The country’s demat universe has multiplied in a handful of years. The question for the decade ahead is not whether Indians will invest, but how and through whose rails.
smallcase has spent ten years answering that quietly, moving India one basket at a time from picking stocks to owning ideas.
We invested because we believe that shift is structural, that the platform beneath it is becoming genuine infrastructure, and that the team building it is only getting started.