Wealth-Tech Platform Winvesta bags Barclays Entrepreneur FinTech Company of the Year 2020 for India

UK headquartered leading new-age wealth-tech platform - Winvesta – has been awarded the ‘FinTech Company of the Year 2020’ for Asia Pacific by Barclays Entrepreneur. In its fifth edition, Barclays Entrepreneur recognizes few of the UK’s most successful home-grown ventures which are disrupting the fintech industry at large.

Winvesta won the award in recognition of its contribution towards a new wave of disruption in the FinTech sector and for its efforts in providing global investing opportunities at the finger-tips of every Indian Investor. Launched in March 2020, Winvesta aims to democratise investment opportunities for every Indian with an easy access to overseas investments. The company’s product suite includes US stock trading and international banking facilities. Winvesta’s international multi-currency account enables users to hold accounts in GBP, EUR and USD that facilitates alternate investment such as in international real estate. 

Winvesta’s Founder and CEO Swastik Nigam said, “I am humbled and delighted to receive this prestigious recognition and on behalf of our entire team, would like to express our gratitude to the Barclays team. At Winvesta, we are committed in building a convenient and hassle-free ecosystem for Indian-investors which enables them to seamlessly invest in the matured overseas markets.”

Winvesta enables Indian users to invest in global brands they know, use and love, with a simple and streamlined process. Available across Android and iOS, Winvesta app allows digital on-boarding of customers in just 15 mins. Through its partnership with DriveWealth, LLC., the company allows its customers to buy fractional shares, at real-time market prices, of familiar US brands such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple.

Winvesta’s Co-founder and President Prateek Jain said, “We are a young organisation, determined to make considerable difference to how investments are perceived in India. Such recognitions act as great encouragements and further strengthen our resolute. We believe Indian retail investors have started to realise the importance of portfolio diversification across markets and Winvesta’s secure and intuitive platform will help them fulfil their investment goals effortlessly.”

Winvesta along with nine other fintech companies from around the world won the award in their respective regions. The Grand Finale or the Global Awards is scheduled to take place in November 2020.


About Winvesta

Winvesta is a new-age wealth-tech startup offering Indians a platform to invest overseas. It is built by a team of finance professionals each with over a decade of experience in global financial services. Their core belief is that diversification, consistency and low transaction costs are the keys to build an efficient portfolio. Diversification for Indian investors has long been limited to domestic instruments. Investing overseas has been difficult and expensive. Winvesta is changing that by bringing global investing to the finger-tips of every Indian investor.

DocSumo Raises $220k seed funding from Better Capital, Techstars and Barclays

The start-up will use the fresh funds to build sales channels in USA and strengthen its product to unlock new use cases

DocSumo, document AI startup founded in 2019, raises seed funding from Better Capital, an early stage venture firm with fintech investments in notable companies like Rupeek, Open, Khatabook, YAP and others. Global accelerators TechStars and Barclays also participated in this round making the total raise for the company to $220K.  The start-up provides intelligent workflow automation for financial services companies to save back office costs by up to 70% through document data capture, analytics and fraud detection.

DocSumo, which is headquartered in Mumbai, was founded by Rushabh Sheth (CEO), ex-Managing Director of Rocket Internet in Asia and Bikram Dahl (CTO), who was leading business intelligence and data science for the same firm. The startup has its engineering team based out of Kathmandu, Nepal and head office in Mumbai. Seeing the head of finance at their previous firm spend days reconciling invoices with bank statements, Rushabh and Bikram leveraged their data science and software engineering expertise to build Docsumo.

The document AI market is valued at $1.5 billion globally and with recent advancements in computer vision, it is growing 70% annually. DocSumo’s core technology platform helps in the automation and analysis of financial data such as bank statements, pay stubs, tax data, and business financial documents. It helps companies and firms to convert unstructured documents into structured data. Using various analytics techniques and data science, Docsumo helps its clients reduce turnaround times and increase accuracy and efficiency of the underwriting process. 

Speaking about its core value proposition, Rushabh Sheth, founder and CEO, Docsumo said, “Even today, most financial services firms outsource their back-office operations in India where thousands of people do mundane tasks of entering data and verifying documents. Not only is it costly and takes a long time, but it is also error-prone. Using natural language processing, DocSumo automates the reading of documents to enable companies to make faster and accurate decisions. Our aim is to build a ground-breaking AI solution that can read documents the way humans do and make data trapped in those documents actionable.”

DocSumo will use this investment to strengthen its product, marketing and sales engine, and also foray into newer markets like the USA. Going forward, the company plans to build a suite of API products that will help lenders and insurers to automate their operations thereby providing better customer experience. 

“Documents are the starting point of thousands of workflows at small & large organizations across industries. DocSumo is building on the cutting edge advancements in computer vision and natural language processing to extract data and context inside documents to enable automation of document workflows like never before. At Better, we are excited to be part of DocSumo’s journey as it unlocks this large and growing Document AI opportunity”, said Vaibhav Domkundwar of Better Capital. 

Other than saving time and money, Docsumo has a range of API products for reading ID cards, bank statements and tax returns. They are currently working with large lenders in India such as PaySense (acquired by PayU) to enable real-time customer onboarding and also with insurers in the USA to enable reading of policy documents.

91springboard to Launch a FinTech Focused Co-working Space in Mumbai; Join Hands With Barclays

91SpringBoard has joined hands with Barclays to launch a FinTech focused coworking space - ‘Rise Mumbai’ in the heart of Mumbai on June 15th 2016. Rise is a network of physical spaces and a virtual community designed to bring together the world’s brightest thinkers and doers to create the future of financial technology. After its foray in London, New York, Manchester, Cape Town, Vilnius and Tel Aviv, Rise has now arrived in Mumbai, India to encourage the most promising startups in the country.

In addition to the world-class co-working facility, entrepreneurs working out of this space will also gain access to Barclays’ exclusive global network of curated experts and partners and will be linked to all of the Rise global sites.

Rise Mumbai offers a range of state-of- the-art facilities including 140 Seat Auditorium, 64 Open Desks, 15 Offices (90 Desks), Meeting Rooms and Conference Room (20 Seater). Its offerings include – private office/dedicated seat, unlimited 24/7 access, ultra fast Wifi, access to meeting rooms, invites to exclusive members events, free drip coffee, soda, tea & water, mentorship + advice at rise office hours, private locker and a lot of events, workshops and activities around Fintech.

Rise Mumbai focuses towards financial technology (fintech) startups. It is also open to non-fintech startups that can potentially contribute to fintech/ financial services, eg. startups into AI, Machine Learning, Analytics to name a few.

Rise Mumbai will also be hosting numerous programmes for open innovation - mentorship, hackathons, daily events, global challenges and much more.

Barclays hopes to create an ecosystem of fintech focused startups that will help the bank solve some of its tech related problems as well as give these startups access to a banking culture along with the possibility of having Barclays as their first customer. They have a dedicated team whose focus is to interact with startups at the hub.