Wealth management start-up Fintso looking at $10-million funding

Fintso, the start-up focused on financial advisors in the wealth management space, is looking at raising at least USD 10 million from venture capital funds by late-March or early-April.

The API-based platform-as-a-service for financial advisors and their clients was launched by George Mitra, who was the chief executive of Avendus Wealth, and Rajan Pathak, a wealth management veteran, in November 2020 and has already raised USD3 million in the first round.

Fintso helps independent financial product providers get easy access to retail investors by giving them access to multi-products, digital execution, and advisory support and now caters to over 3,400 independent distributors/agents, who are servicing 15 lakh retail clients having assets of Rs 1.4 lakh crore, Mitra said.

The company had initial funding of USD 3 million from angels and family offices, including Kanwaljit Singh of Fireside Ventures, Nikhil Vora of Sixth Sense, Brijesh Agarwal who co-founded Indiamart, and Piyush Gupta, who is the group CFO at HT media, Dilip Khandelwal (global CIO of Deutsche Bank), and some of the large family offices, he said.

Fintso is in talks with a few domestic and overseas venture capital funds for the second round of funding of at least USD 10 million and expects to sign the term-sheet late-March or early-April, Mitra, co-founder and chief executive, told PTI.

The money will be used for expansion, hiring talent and also for more product innovation as the market potential is also large given the two million plus independent agents and financial product distributors in the country. It is led by LIC's 1.2 million agents over 0.5 million agents for other financial firms/insurers along with over one lakh mutual fund distributors.

Fintso works with vertical fintech companies providing them multi-product access and access to retail investors. To further widen its reach, it has also integrated its platform with Smallcase and Stockal, apart from integrating with Mahindra Corporate Finance to offer corporate FDs to customers.

Last October, it bought the SaaS-based mutual fund distribution platform Wealthmagic from DataComp in a slump-sale. Wealthmagic is one of the largest, transforming their back and front office operations.