Hi Team, this is our founding story from my eyes. Parth, Sid and I have been on this journey since November 2020 and here are some of the key moments through our journey so far.

Hopefully you’ll realise three things:

  1. Startup journeys are not linear
  2. You are competent enough to start a company… If we can do it so can you. Please however learn from our mistakes and get a head start 🤣
  3. Do not give up! As long as you have enough money in the bank, you can try, try and try again!

I will keep updating this as time goes on

Best, Ishwar

Moving to India (September 2020 - October 2020)

After finishing my Masters at Imperial, and coming back to India for what was supposed to be a short break, I had three options:

  1. Move back to India and work for my family business
  2. Start a job at Saltpe - UK based payments startup
  3. Go back and apply for jobs at investment banks like most of my peers

After having experience in both sides of the coin with M&A and operating a company (Family Office & Start Engine) - being an operator was far more appealing. It was the middle of Covid, and I thought to myself there is no better time to start a company - I had nothing to lose. If I failed I could always move back to the UK or US and find a great job in IB and consulting. So I gave myself 4 months (Till December) to launch a product.

Like any early-stage founder, I needed to find a problem space where I had some level of founder-market-fit… Wealth Management, Corporate Finance, or other Fintech verticals.

I was lucky to have been managing my family office for about a year or so, and I was exposed to the best investment managers and products available in the country at the time. So, I started by identifying the problems I faced running this business.

There were 2 major issues I faced:

  1. Investment/banking data is spread across multiple platforms - aggregating this data in one place is very difficult
  2. Customers (including myself) are almost always mis sold products - loans, investments, insurance. If someone like me with a MSc in Finance can be missold, what about the masses?

Here is my first customer interview ever (October 6th, 2020):