For most of us, 2020 was an eventful year for everyone in a way. Many memories from the previous year will continue to be with us for the rest of our lives. Personally it wasn’t a great year for me, many unexpected setbacks, discoveries, experiences, pushed me back to where I was a few years back – nowhere.
Many people who know me also know that I am a big believer in this – Always believe that something wonderful is about to happen 🙂
2021 is a year of hope, and personally for me a year of new beginnings. This time I am not starting from scratch, I am starting from my experiences. I have done it before, and I aim to do it again – raise the bar! This time even higher with Raise Financial Services.
Financial services in India are in its early stages of adoption and expected to witness a massive change – be it growth, products, service offerings, distribution or expectations from the consumers. There is a large set of startups that are making financial services accessible to millions of Indians, bringing them to Bharat by taking them to tier-3, tier-4 towns and beyond.
While all this is happening at a much faster rate along with driving accessibility and adoption, there is also a large set of Indians today who are financially aware and financially literate; who value their time, product experience & quality of service much more – residing in the metros, cities & tier-1 & 2 towns that are either looking for a differentiated experience or should be provided with one. We believe that these users in India require much better / smarter experience with financial products and services than the options that are in the market today. Raise will offer consumer products & services that cater to these users directly, and will offer the same technology & infrastructure to partners in the startup ecosystem willing to take the experience to the rest of the market.
At Raise – we are aiming for zero to one in financial services. We have no legacy, building it all ground up – people (in this journey), culture (that resonates and binds us together), products (that our customers value), (form lasting relationships with) partners, (a fundamentally strong) business and a brand (that users trust). We are building technology-led consumer products & infrastructure services to serve Indians with financial services (across financing, insurance, investments, payments and wealth). Earning money is already hard, managing money should not be. We will launch a series of consumer products, expecting the first one to be available in the second half of this year.
Starting up is easy, entrepreneurship is not, I have personally realised this over the years. And I am humbled to find support & guidance in this journey from founders, serial entrepreneurs, operators and friends who I have personally admired and look up to.
My gratitude towards founders & friends who have invested in Raise Financial Services, this includes – Kunal Shah (Cred, Freecharge), Kalyan Krishnamurthi (Flipkart), Amod Malviya & Sujeet Kumar (Udaan), Sameer Nigam & Rahul Chari (PhonePe), Amrish Rau (Pine Labs, Citrus Pay), Sandeep Tandon (Freecharge), Anupam Mittal (Shaadi.com, People Group), Jitendra Gupta (Jupiter, Citrus Pay), Girish Mathrubootham (Freshworks), Nischal Shetty (WazirX, Crowdfire), Kuldeep Dhankar (Clevertap, Microsoft, Nokia), Shiladitya Mukhopadhyaya (Clevertap), Sreevatsa Prabhakar (Servify), Uday Sodhi (Kurate, Sony Digital, Rediff), Amit Bhor (Walnut, Capital Float), Shachin Bharadwaj (Markk, TastyKhana), Anuj Tandon (Yoozoo), Manav Raheja (J Sagar) and other family and friends. Some names whom I look upto are missing in this list, all of them have assured me they are always a call away in this journey.
With this, I would also like to announce our first round of financing in Raise Financial Services, led by Mirae Asset Venture Investments (their first investment from Mirae Asset’s India focussed early stage fund), with participation from Multi-Act Private Equity, Blume Ventures (via their Founder’s Fund) and US based early-stage investor Social Leverage (led by Howard Lindzon) who made their first investment in India.
Alongside the investors, I have also invested in my personal capacity in this investment round – all in!
Being a little practical as some folks know I am, I have assured all stakeholders in Raise Financial Services of 3 things that will be core to everything we do at Raise –
- ensure our customers are happy & we deliver value above their expectations
- build exceptionally better products
- build a organisation that is based on trust
With that note, we are building our team from zero. We are hiring for team members in roles across leadership (15-20 yrs+), senior (10-14 yrs+), mid (4-8 yrs+) and early stage (1-4 yrs+) in Engineering, Product, Design, Growth, Customer Service & Operations in our business lines (Financing, Insurance, Investments, Payments, Wealth). A detailed post on our opportunities at Raise across business verticals and culture we are building will be up soon.
We will be primarily based in Mumbai (and connected remotely), if you are someone who wants to make a difference, please me an email with details on pj@raiseholding.co or visit www.raiseholding.co
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Raise the bar
pj