Startups have spent the last decade making it frictionless for Indians to buy mutual funds. The next battleground is telling them what to actually buy.
PowerUp Money, a Bengaluru-based wealthtech, has raised $12 million in Series A funding to tackle that advisory gap. The round was led by Peak XV Partners, with significant participation from existing backers Accel and Blume Ventures. The financing also saw support from Kae Capital, 8i Ventures, and DevC.
The capital injection is a massive vote of confidence in a thesis that has historically been difficult to monetize in India: pure-play, subscription-based financial advice.
The Distributor Problem
The premise behind PowerUp is fairly blunt: the current incentive structure in Indian wealth management is broken. Most “free” investment platforms operate on a distribution model, earning commissions from asset management companies when users buy specific funds. This often aligns the platform’s revenue goals with high-fee products rather than the user’s returns.
PowerUp founder and CEO Prateek Jindal wants to flip the table. By operating as a SEBI-registered investment advisor (RIA), the company is legally barred from taking commissions. Instead, it charges the user directly.
Most Indian savers don’t even realize their ‘advisor’ is paid more when they choose the wrong product. We started PowerUp to sit on the investor’s side of the table, not the manufacturer’s.
Jindal’s approach is informed by his previous stint as co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Uni Cards, where he helped scale consumer credit products to millions of users. He observed that while financial access was exploding, financial literacy wasn’t keeping pace. Retail investors were flooding the market, often nudged into products they didn’t understand by agents chasing payouts.
The Bet on Subscriptions
PowerUp’s core offering, PowerUp Elite, creates a subscription gate around its advice. For a flat fee of ₹999 (approximately $12) per year, users get fund selection, portfolio review, and automated rebalancing. The startup claims to use “institution-grade research” to guide these decisions.
The company says it has already onboarded over 25,000 paying subscribers. It’s a promising start, but the real test will be scaling that number. Indian consumers are notoriously averse to paying upfront fees for financial services, usually preferring hidden costs or ad-supported models.
However, the total addressable market is undeniable. India’s mutual fund industry has surged past the $60 billion mark, driven by a structural shift in how the middle class saves money. With fixed deposits losing their luster against inflation, retail capital is moving into equities.
Why Peak XV and Accel are Buying In
For the investors, this isn’t just a bet on an app; it’s a bet on regulatory arbitrage and market maturation. Peak XV’s Navendu Sharma noted that mutual funds are the primary entry point for the mass affluent, yet scalable, unbiased advice remains a white space.
Traditional wealth management is high-touch and expensive, usually reserved for High Net Worth Individuals (HNIs). Robo-advisors exist, but trust remains a barrier. The VCs are betting that Jindal can use technology to democratize the RIA model without exploding customer acquisition costs.
The funding will go toward three main pillars:
- Building the tech stack: Ramping up advisory algorithms and personalization.
- Education: Content-heavy marketing to bridge the trust gap in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.
- Expansion: Growing the team across research and data science.
The Road Ahead
Jindal has set a deeply ambitious target: 10 million users in three years. To get there, PowerUp will have to do more than just offer clean advice; it will have to fundamentally rewire user behavior.
The startup is entering a crowded arena. It faces competition from massive discount brokers who are slowly adding advisory layers, and traditional bank relationship managers who still hold sway over older demographics. There is also the looming question of unit economics—whether a $12 annual fee can sustain a business that requires high-trust marketing and compliance overhead.
PowerUp is also teasing a higher-tier product, PowerUp Infinite, likely aimed at more sophisticated investors, though details remain sparse. For now, the company has the cash and the regulatory license to prove that unbiased advice can be a viable business model in India, not just a moral high ground.
