AI‑Native Family Office CREST Secures $3.1M Pre‑Seed to Expand Platform

CREST, an AI-native Fractional Family Office and new-age asset management company, has raised USD 3.1 Mn in pre-seed funding led by BEENEXT, Sparrow, Shastra VC, DeVC, Warmup Ventures, Atrium Ventures and 91ventures with participation from 40+prominent Indian and UAE founders and CXOs, including Amit Ranjan, Chirag Taneja, Revant Bhate, Shantanu Deshpande, and Kashish Sharma. The funds will be deployed to strengthen the company’s technology platform, expand its family office and investment teams, deepen regulatory and compliance capabilities, and build its asset management offerings across Global and Indian public markets and Real Estate. With this announcement, CREST is formally coming out of stealth as it builds a structured family office platform for India’s emerging wealth and value creators.

CREST combines Family Office advisory, Asset Management, Community, and Technology in one integrated platform. Its services span consolidated reporting, tax-efficient structuring, asset allocation, investment oversight, succession, estate planning, and next-generation development and readiness. Taking an advisory-first approach, CREST helps clients navigate geographies, managers, products, structures, and asset classes with a singular focus on their long-term wealth preservation and growth.

Commenting on the fundraise, Girish Singhi, Co-Founder and Zuhaib Khan, Co-Founder of CREST, said —

Many of India's founders and business owners have built significant wealth, but their personal financial structures haven't kept pace. CREST was built to sit on the client's side of the table, bringing together investment discipline, governance, technology and long-term thinking in one place. This fundraise will allow us to deepen our platform, strengthen our teams, and serve this generation of wealth creators the way they deserve to be served.

According to the UBS Global Wealth Report, India is home to more than 900,000 dollar millionaires today, a number forecast to nearly double by 2030, with the country adding USD 2.4 trillion in new financial wealth over the same period. These families deserve the same rigour, alignment, and long-term thinking that Family Offices have always provided to the ultra-wealthy. And all these families have two pools of capital - Domestic and International. We built CREST to bring an incentive-aligned, fiduciary-first, and retrocession-free Family Office to these conversations, for both pools of capital - domestic and international.”

Commenting on the investment, Saksham Pant, Principal at BEENEXT, said —

Founders, CXOs, and business families today are looking for trusted partners to help manage and grow their wealth long term. Girish, Zuhaib and the CREST team, with their strong investment expertise and an AI product built on top of India’s significantly improved financial infrastructure, are building a modern family office platform for the next generation of wealth creators and we’re excited to partner with them.

Over the next twelve months, CREST plans to expand its technology platform, deepen its family office services, and grow its asset management offerings for clients across India and the UAE. The company will continue to build strategic partnerships with CA firms, audit firms, legal experts and other trusted advisers who work closely with India's wealth creators. Its longer-term ambition is to become the most trusted Family Office for founders and value creators across India, the UAE and Singapore.

About CREST:

CREST is an AI-native Fractional Family Office and new-age Asset Management company that partners with founders, families, HNIs, emerging UHNIs, and institutions to build their own Family Offices to manage, structure and preserve wealth with discipline, alignment and foresight. The company combines family office advisory, asset management, technology and community across areas such as asset allocation, investment oversight, consolidated reporting, succession planning, estate planning, governance, philanthropy, real assets, alternatives and long-term wealth stewardship. CREST is anchored in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Dubai. For more information, please visit www.crest-capital.com.

About BEENEXT:

BEENEXT is a Venture Capital fund managed by serial entrepreneurs that focuses on assisting founders with their operational experience, network, trust, unique perspectives, and capital. The team invests in early-stage tech start-ups that are focused on building new digital platforms driven by the data network. BEENEXT is a platform of founders, by the founders, and for the founders across the globe, primarily in Southeast Asia, India, and Japan. Since its establishment in 2015, the team has invested in over 200 companies globally. For more information, please visit www.beenext.com.

Aditya-L1 Mission – DST Institutes IIA, ARIES, CREST and IUCAA Key Drivers in Designing Payloads To Automated Algo for Detecting CMEs

Aditya-L1, India's first observatory to study Sun, seeded in IIA - ISRO discussions to observe solar corona closely

• Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC), the primary payload developed by IIA
• IIA & ARIES designed the first automated algorithm to detect CMEs on board Aditya-L1 using the VELC instrument
• Aditya-L1 support cell established at ARIES to act as community service centre for analyzing science data

India’s Aditya-L1, a space observatory with 7 payloads heading for a vantage point to study the Sun has started countdown for its journey. It had its beginnings in preliminary/initial discussions between the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) about possible observations of the solar corona using indigenous space based telescopes.

Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC)

VELC Engineering Team Members in front of the truck which had the VELC all packed and ready to go to ISRO

IIA, an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), had initially proposed a ‘suitable coronagraph’ payload to be mounted on a small satellite offered by ISRO. This ‘suitable coronagraph’ later graduated to the Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC) and still prevails as the primary payload, even as India’s Solar study ambitions expanded, making it a national initiative with multi-institutional collaboration.

The VELC will image the Sun's atmosphere, the corona, closer to the Sun than ever before, at high resolution and time cadence. The payload has 40 different optical elements of high precision and will be kept at a temperature of 22 degrees celsius in space.

Led by IIA, the VELC was designed, assembled, characterised, tested and integrated at Centre for Research and Education in Science and Technology (CREST) campus in Hosakote and delivered in close collaboration with ISRO. A Clean Room of international standard (India's first large-scale “Class 10” Clean Room) was constructed for the purpose inside its MGK Menon Laboratory. ISRO made the mirrors and detectors and provided them to IIA, while IIA delivered the completed VELC to ISRO on 26 Jan 2023.

Faculty, students, postdocs in IIA who work on solar astrophysics

Since VELC observes the Sun closest to its surface, many other Aditya-L1 payloads also need its data about new coronal mass ejections and other eruptions. The VELC Payload Operations Centre (POC) set up in IIA campus, will receive raw data from ISRO Indian Space Science Data Centre (ISSDC) and process them further to make it suitable for scientific analysis.

The processed data will be sent back to ISSDC for dissemination. The scientific team at IIA will use the Aditya-L1 data from its many payloads in conjunction with field station observations on the ground to gain a deeper understanding of the Sun-Earth links and, more crucially, the space-weather impact.

Kodaikanal Solar Observatory and Gauribidanur Radio Observatory of IIA will play a key role in this.

Automated Algorithm To Detect Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs)

IIA and Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), an another institute of DST, designed an automated algorithm to detect CMEs (Coronal Mass Ejections) on board Aditya-L1 using the VELC instrument. This algorithm will be the first of its kind to track the huge bubbles of gas threaded with magnetic field lines that are ejected from the Sun, disrupting space weather and causing geomagnetic storms, satellite failures, and power outages.

Solar physics group at ARIES

This algorithm has been hard-coded by ISRO and will be used to detect CMEs automatically on board Aditya-L1, making it one of the first onboard intelligence algorithms for this purpose as no similar thing has been attempted in previous NASA or ESA missions studying the Sun.

Aditya-L1 Support Cell (AL1SC)

ISRO has also collaborated with ARIES to establish the Aditya-L1 Support Cell at ARIES. The Aditya-L1 Support Cell (AL1SC) acts as a community service centre for the guest observers in preparing science observing proposals and analyzing science data.

This support cell will provide additional tools and train users about solar physics and provide help to understand, download and analyse the data from ISSDC/ISRO. AL1SC is conducting workshops in different parts of the country to familiarise students with the basic processes happening on the Sun, current open problems, the Aditya-L1 mission and observational data analysis.

X-ray Spectrometers and In-Situ Instruments

Aditya-L1 carries an ultraviolet imager, two X-ray spectrometers, and four in-situ instruments to measure plasma parameters. These are made by various centres of ISRO and the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) with contributions from many other institutions.

Crest Raises Over Rs. 6.5 Crores From IAN, IPV and Founders of Delhivery, Pickrr, Shiprocket Amongst Others

The funds will be used to expand Crest’s product offerings, scale operations and onboard more brands faster.

Bangalore based Automated Inventory Planning SaaS startup Crest raised 800K USD in its pre-seed funding round, led by IAN and IPV, along with notable founders of companies viz. Delhivery, Shiprocket, Pickrr, Smytten, Samosa Party, and Sirona among others.

“Crest is built for D2C e-commerce and is focused on solving the fundamental issue of those businesses, i.e. reducing lost sales opportunities by increasing fill rate and helping optimise inventory through real time demand forecasting. By impacting the core of the business, Crest becomes a CXO priority and is not just another enabling software. In the fast evolving e-commerce and multi-shop retailing real time demand forecasting and inventory management is the need of the hour,” said Shantanu Ghosh & Vidit Nagory, IAN Lead Investors.

“We are excited by what Crest has built and the immense potential of the space, both in India and global markets. Crest is being led by founders who have deep working experience in supply chain & AI and who have seen success in their earlier venture in a similar space catering to large global brands. They are addressing a real need and enabling even small enterprises, access to AI-driven inventory optimisation across multiple channels and demand forecasting ability,” said Ivy Chin, Partner, IPV. 

Launched in March 2022, Crest is an automated inventory planning tool, designed to help D2C brands and SMBs in eliminating stockouts. It helps brands by providing answers to four crucial questions: What to order; When to order; How much to stock; Where to place. The result is improved serviceability and reduced risk of stockouts, right from the first month of implementation. Given the importance of these attributes and the progress that Crest has made, the round also saw participation from notable investors from the supply chain industry including Ankit Sethi.

The funds will be deployed to broaden Crest’s product offerings and scale the operations. Furthermore, in light of the current global economic slowdown, Crest seeks to assist brands in maintaining their financial stability by implementing efficient inventory practices to optimise their working capital.

“In less than 12 months, Crest has already onboarded numerous customers from various industries, improving serviceability by up to 95%, reducing out-of-stock situations by up to 90%, and automating supply chain operations. Notable customers include Samosa Party, Wow Skin, Swiss Beauty, Pro Nature, and Sleepwell, among others,” said Rahul Vishwakarma, Co-founder & CEO, Crest. 

About Crest:

Crest is a Bangalore-based, SaaS startup that helps D2Cs and SMBs accelerate revenue growth by eliminating frequent stock-outs. The product simplifies supply chain operations by using AI and Machine Learning to accurately predict demand, automate purchase planning and distribution planning. Crest helps customers in improving availability across different nodes and channels in the supply chain. Within three months of engagement it was able to reduce stock out frequency by half, resulting in a 15% increase in top-line revenue.

Crest was founded in 2022 by Rahul Vishwakarma, Akhil Kumar, and Yogesh Byahatti. Prior to founding Crest, three of them had been assisting businesses in improving their supply chains. To learn more about Crest, visit https://www.getcrest.ai/

About IAN:

Indian Angel Network is India’s first and world’s largest business angel network with close to 500 members across the world, comprising the who’s who of successful entrepreneurs and dynamic CEOs. With investors from 12 countries, IAN’s presence spans 7 locations, which includes cities in India and the UK. The network is sector agnostic and has funded start-ups across 19 sectors in India and 7 other countries growing global footprint companies. With an excellent track record, IAN has been giving excellent cash exits year-on-year to its investor members, for the last 12 years. Some of its marquee investee companies include Druva, Spinny, Box8, Uniphore, WOW Momos, Consure, Fareye, NOCCARC, Propelld, Skit.ai Dhruva Space, Webengage, Farmart, Planet Sparks, amongst many others.

Along with the IAN Fund, an INR 375 crore VC fund, BioAngels and now a Rs. 1000 crores IAN Alpha Fund, the IAN Group has created the single largest platform for seed and early-stage investing, enabling entrepreneurs to raise from Rs. 25 lakhs to Rs. 50 crores.