My cofounder Hemant (@hemantgangolia) has been living in the US since 6 years and has tried multiple times to invest in India. He couldn't go ahead with the process because bank account opening was a challenge and the process after that wasn't clear. There is complexity around taxation, moving money back and a general lack of clarity on where to invest.
Even though there are currently over 30 million Indian expats globally, there are no digital, full-service solutions offered for them specifically. US solutions focus only on US investments and Indian solutions focus only on Indian customers—this makes the India US belt underserved. Indian banks with overseas branches offer these services, but investors don’t trust these banks because of conflict of interest. There are other small players in the market but they expect customers to do their own service, which is not what customers want, based on our learnings.
We found a lot of other Indian expats in the same situation as us - wanting to invest in India for financial and emotional reasons, but unable to do so easily or consistently. We wished a simple product existed to solve for this online. We couldn’t find one, so we built it.
Inri is like Wealthfront for your India investments. It is a web platform that offers curated mutual fund portfolios and solves for all tax compliance and repatriation needs online. We have curated the funds based on performance, history and compliance based on your resident country, and funds are selected based on your risk preference, similarly to Wealthfront. We facilitate investments through central platforms like National Stock Exchange and show the holdings via a dashboard on the platform once the investments are done. Additionally, we do this while making tax compliance and repatriation easy.
Just log in to the platform, upload your documents, approve the emails with details confirmation and you’re sorted. Currently, only people with a PAN card (Indian financial identity document) can invest.
Our early customers are all people who have tried doing this before, but gave up because of all the hassle. The fact that they could get invested in just 2 days vs weeks for traditional alternatives was unheard of to them.
We know this is a bit of a niche product for HN but we also know that there are quite a few Indian expats like us here, who could make use of it—and we hope it makes interesting enough reading for everybody else. We would love to get your feedback! Thank you!