Aiming to establish its brand image from savings and investments in mutual funds, online mutual funds platform Scripbox has raised a Series B round investment led by Omidyar Network , which is the philanthropic investment firm of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s.
As part of the deal, Scripbox joins Omidyar’s other investment in the personal savings space including US-based Juntos and UK-based digital bank Tandem.
The round also saw participation from existing investors including Accel Partners and some angels. Scripbox has earlier raised $2.3 million Series-A funding in August 2015 from Accel Partners and a group of leading angel investors. In 2012, it had raised a seed funding of about $616K from Accel Partners and angel investors including Balakrishna Adiga, H S Nagaraja and S Srinivasan.
The funds will further give thrust to Scripbox’s vision of empowering every salaried individual with actionable money skills.
E R Ashok Kumar, CEO of Scripbox, said, ““We want to encourage people to explore inflation-beating instruments rather than inflation-par instruments like FDs or gold. Equities will give you a 14-15% return compared to traditional forms of investing.”
He further added that there is a certain level of resistance to investing in mutual funds due to poor awareness and fear of volatility that gets nullified later on after people witness the benefits of staying invested in these products.
Founded by former Citigroup executive Sanjiv Singhal in 2012, Scripbox uses proprietary algorithms to curate a portfolio of 8 mutual funds from the universe of over 8,000 mutual funds in the country in three categories – equity, debt and tax savings.
“We have less than 1 crore people investing in mutual funds in the country. India has only 3-4% household penetration of mutual funds that compares poorly with mature markets like the US that has 45%,” stated Kumar.
Anuradha Ramachandran, the director of investments at Omidyar Network, said, “As India moves from promoting adoption and usage of financial services to building consumers’ financial health, simplified offerings like Scripbox will become more strategic, Scripbox is set to make a fundamental difference to the way Indians save and invest in their future, turning a deep understanding of consumers’ needs into an innovative technology-led platform.”
