4 things an angel investor likes about this fintech startup

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to investream US India. I'm Pankaj, and today I'm going to discuss a young startup that's making it super easy to invest in stocks and ETFs based on ideas. Coming up after this. Welcome back to investream. So, as I was saying, I want to talk about a startup. I'm not going to tell you the name of the startup that allows you to create a portfolio of stocks and ETFs based on ideas that either you have or other people have. You can download the app, open it up, set it up. The most important thing you have to do is you have to link your account to your brokerage account. Once it's linked to your brokerage account, you're good to go. So once you're set up, all you really need to do is open up the app, search for a particular use case that you might have, or just browse ideas that are already there. Once you find a idea that you like, just tap on it. Once it opens up, you'll see a list of all the stocks or ETFs that are included in this micro portfolio. You can do all the research. It'll show you news, it'll show you price movements, charts, all the usual stuff, but in a pretty nice user interface and in a way that is easily digestible for most people. If you decide that you like a portfolio and you want to buy it, tap the buy button so the order is executed directly from your brokerage account. That means the money leaves your brokerage account and the portfolio gets deposited into your brokerage account. The thing that I thought was really interesting about this idea was that it wasn't exactly a robo advisory and it wasn't exactly paying huge commissions to a financial advisor to manage your portfolio and do things for you. It was somewhere in the middle. So I got some advice, I got some technology, but ultimately I make the decision based on things that I think could be potentially interesting ideas and build a portfolio around it. One of the nice things is that the app does an allocation automatically across all the stocks and ETFs that are in the portfolio. So as an investor, I don't really need to think about how much I want to put in one stock versus another. It's all there for me. As an investor in the stock market, I understand the value that a product like this offers. It gives me an opportunity to create micro portfolios of stocks that I may not consider buying otherwise. It is really easy to research and buy stocks on the app, and less risky because once I buy, the shares get deposited directly into my brokerage account. So what would an angel investor or a VC see in a company like this? Well, one, it's a pretty novel idea. It's not robo advisory. It's not your traditional advisory service. It's something in the middle, like I mentioned before. But the interesting thing is that it could appeal to two potential customer segments. The obvious one, which we talked about was a retail investor. And the other side of it is the B2B side. Now, a company like this could create a backend application, give it to financial advisors or brokerage firms and say, here you go. Give your analysts access to the app, let them create micro portfolios, put them on to our platform, and it serves as a sort of lead gen opportunity for independent financial advisors or for brokerage firms. So that's one thing that I liked about it. Two potential customers that you can generate revenue off. Number two, ease of use. For the average person to be able to pull out their phone, research possible ideas, and with a few taps, enter the market or exit is extremely powerful. Sure, most brokerage firms have mobile and web apps where you can do a lot of these things, but if you haven't looked at any of these recently, you should. They're mostly functional, but they have terrible user experience and they're pretty ugly as well. So number three, with the growth of Robo Advisors, it's shown us that there's a growing market for making investing simpler and moving it directly into the hands of the investor, cutting out the middleman. So again, another thing that makes this interesting, number four, traction. Now, this is all public information. None of this is private information. This is published on the web. In roughly two and a half years, the the startup has acquired over 250,000 investors using the platform and they've done transactions worth more than $280 million. Not bad for small and young company. The company is named Small Case. They're based out of Bangalore, India. So unfortunately, those of us in the US we can't use their app to buy stocks traded in the U.S. however, if you're based out of India, yes, you can use the app. I don't know how many transactions Small Case has actually done. That information I wasn't able to find online. And without having all the details of their financials and traction and growth and all that, it's pretty hard to put a valuation on the company. But Small Case just closed an 8 million Series A from Sequoia India. So congratulations to Sequoia and Small Case on closing the Series A. We don't know what the post Money valuation for the round was, but we can estimate that it was probably somewhere around 25 to 30 million dollars post money and it also shows how heavily Sequoia continues to push into the fintech space. Now, if you're a user of Small Case, if you're based out of India, please leave your comments in the section below. I'd love to know your experience using the app. What was it like now with Sequoia backing Small Case? Hopefully we'll see the app in other parts of the world like the us. If you liked the video, please leave a thumbs up. If you didn't like the video, feel free to leave a thumbs down, but leave us a comment. Let me know what you thought was helpful and useful, and please tell me what wasn't helpful or useful as well so I can make better videos for you. Thanks again for joining me on investstream US India. I'll see you again soon. If you've got a question, feel free to drop us an email at investstreamlockhackio or tweet me on Twitter or feel free to leave a comment in the section below.