Stockal, the fintech startup that enables anyone to invest overseas, today announces $3 million in pre-Series A funding to support its rapid growth into new markets.
The new funding brings the total investment to $5m since it was launched in January 2020.
Stockal was founded to enable investors in India to take stakes in a variety of assets - including shares, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and hedge funds - outside of the Indian market. Previously, the only way for Indians to access overseas capital markets was to have a direct relationship with a major brokerage, putting fractional ownership beyond the reach of all but the largest investors.
In little over a year Stockal has attracted over 60,000 users from India, UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and eight other countries, trading half a billion dollars-worth of assets and amassing nearly $100 million assets under management (AUM). The average investing account holds investments of around $8,000, demonstrating how Stockal’s fractional stock investment model opens asset ownership to a far wider pool of individual and retail investors, and enables banks and wealth managers to provide a range of new investment services for their customers.
Large financial institutions such as HDFC, Motilal Oswal, Geojit and dozens of wealth management and fintech outfits in India and the Middle East have partnered with Stockal to bring cross-border investments to their own customers and opening up a huge potential growth market. Stockal estimates that the potential AUM in India, MENA and SE Asia is approximately $800billion, with revenue potential for retail global investing of around $35billion.
Venture capital firms have been quick to take advantage of the new market that Stockal is pioneering, with a range of investors contributing to the company’s pre-Series A funding. These include Aroa Ventures - the family office of Oyo Rooms founder Ritesh Agarwal, Cadenza Capital Management, wealth management platform Kristal.ai, startup research platform Tracxn Labs, July Ventures and Credence Family Office.
Stockal will use the funding to turbocharge its growth into new markets, with the company identifying Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Eastern Europe as particularly high-growth markets. The company is also investing heavily in developing its service offering, such as its recently-launched Stacks portfolio management platform which enables users to choose from a range of carefully-tailored investment opportunities created by global asset management and wealth management companies such as GlobalX Funds.
“There is a glaring problem with international capital, which is that it’s easy to spend money overseas but practically impossible to save internationally and invest in global growth stories outside your home market,” said Sitashwa Srivastava, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Stockal. “We founded Stockal to open the best global capital markets to all global investors, enabling anyone to participate in investment opportunities anywhere in the world. This allows retail investors to access the full range of high-calibre companies, funds, and other interesting assets on a seamless and affordable fractional investing platform. With almost Half-a-billion Dollars processed on Stockal in just over a year, we have proven that there’s huge demand. Now, we are partnering with high-quality investors, who’re aligned with our vision, to go after the significant opportunity in front of us.”
“At Stockal, we are working towards our mission of democratizing global investing. Geographical boundaries should not be a constraint when you are looking at investing and participating in the global economy. With this strategic fund infusion, we will be able expand to multiple new capital markets and offer unique and diversified asset classes to our customers” said Vinay Bharathwaj, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Stockal “While we have established our presence in India significantly and currently manage over USD 100M, we aim to capture a huge potential growth market of about $800 billion which includes MENA and SE Asia.” He further added, “We will also be innovating our product offering by adding fractionalizing and tokenizing different asset classes to make investing in global markets accessible to all. These new funds will help us enhance the platform as we build for a wider audience.”
Gaurav Gulati of ScaleX Partners, which manages Aroa Ventures, said, “There are enormous growth opportunities for any business that can truly democratise investment, and in just a few months Stockal has demonstrated the huge potential size of this new market. Our investment is recognition of the company’s unique value proposition and its ambitious growth strategy to bring overseas investment to ever more markets around the world.”
Kumar Dandapani, Managing Partner at Cadenza Capital Management said, “Cadenza strongly believes in the Stockal team and their ability to build a next generation brokerage that captures a high growth market opportunity by removing barriers that persist in access to global equity markets.”