smallcase: The theme of things

From left: Rohan Gupta, Vasanth Kamath and Anugrah Shrivastava's smallcase helps people invest in theme-based portfolios
Image: Nishant Ratnakar for Forbes India

smallcase: The theme of things
Vasanth Kamath | 27
Anugrah Shrivastava | 28
Rohan Gupta | 28
CEO; founders, smallcase
Category: Finance

In end-March 2015, Vasant Kamath was feeling restless—he had quit research firm Tracxn with the aim to create a finance product—when he called his friend from IIT Kharagpur Anugrah Shrivastava. Shrivastava was then creating thematic products for institutional investors at Nomura.

Keen to work on their own, Kamath and Shrivastava connected with another IITian friend, Rohan Gupta, a tech expert at Goldman Sachs India. In July 2016, the trio launched smallcase, a platform that offers investors the option of creating, or investing in, theme-based portfolios of stocks or exchange-traded funds.

Some of its earliest themes were GST, affordable housing and digital India—at a time when there were few options in the industry, such as consumption and natural resources. The most popular themes now are all-weather, smart beta, bargain buys and brand value. The Bengaluru-based company, which employs 51 people, has created over 60 portfolios itself, and its users have created about 50,000.

“smallcase is an inbuilt tool that encourages investors towards diversification and thinking portfolios rather than just stocks,” says Ravi Varanasi, chief business development officer at the National Stock Exchange of India.

smallcase has broking platform Zerodha, Axis Capital, HDFC Securities and Edelweiss Securities as partners and over 2.4 lakh active customers. The company earns revenues through fees of around ₹100 whenever a user invests in a portfolio, but not each time they buy or sell stocks. Revenues for FY18 touched ₹1.6 crore, a fivefold jump from FY17. 

smallcase has raised ₹55.5 crore from Sequoia Capital India, Blume Ventures, Straddle Capital and other institutional investors through three rounds of funding. “We are expanding to 10 brokerage firms [from four] by March and will also tap advisors,” says CEO Kamath.