On a recent evening, Nikhil Dawe, a 35-year-old Bengaluru-based product manager, logged into his investment app — not to buy the next trending stock, but to try and answer a far more fundamental question about his future planning: Can I retire by 50?

It’s a shift that, wealth-tech startups say, is now playing out across India. The country’s retail investing boom — fuelled by easy access, low-cost broking, and surging interest in systematic investment plans (SIP) — has taken a fresh turn as users seek guidance for long-term wealth creation.

“Instead of asking ‘what should I buy this week’, many are asking ‘how should I allocate for the next five years’,” says Aditya Shankar, co-founder of Centricity WealthTech. “People are slowly realising that wealth creation is not a one-product decision. It’s about consistency, allocation, discipline, and staying invested through cycles.”

That evolution, in turn, is reshaping how wealth-tech startups are building products — and how they make money.

Funding trends reflect this transition. From a relatively modest $21.7 million across 35 rounds in 2020, funding for India’s wealth-tech segment surged to $139 million in 2021, before moderating for a while amid tight capital conditions. Funding rebounded to $142 million in 2024, and the momentum carried into 2025 at $135.9 million across 36 rounds.

“While deal volumes have remained relatively steady, the capital flows indicate periodic investor re-rating of the space, with funding skewed towards phases of stronger market confidence rather than year-on-year expansion,” says Neha Singh, co-founder of Tracxn.

More importantly, the direction of fund flow has changed. Financial planning and advisory platforms have attracted the most capital since 2020 ($175 million), followed by savings and expense management platforms, in a broader shift to holistic financial management.

Shifting revenue model

“The industry has matured,” says Shankar. “Earlier, revenue models were linked to activity, namely transactions, brokerage, short-term flows. That works in good markets. Now there is more emphasis on durable relationships.”

At wealth management company Dezerv, the shift is even more pronounced. “Nearly 95 per cent of our revenue comes from fees for PMS (portfolio management services) and AIF (alternative investment funds) strategies,” says co-founder Sandeep Jethwani. The underlying bet: Investors, particularly the affluent, are more willing to pay for outcomes — not just access.

This also highlights a flaw in the first wave of wealth-tech services: lack of improved outcomes.

“Roughly six in 10 portfolios that clients upload for review are underperforming their own benchmark indices,” Jethwani notes, pointing to fragmented portfolios, poor asset allocation, and behavioural biases. The result is a decisive move toward delegated or guided investing, including portfolio construction and management.

Shobhit Mathur, Co-founder, Ionic Wealth, noted a 25-75 split between transaction-led and annuity revenue, signalling a move toward monetisation linked to assets under management (AUM). He adds that ticket sizes and AUM per user differ across segments.

“For emerging high net-worth individual clients, average AUM is about ₹50 lakh, with investment portfolios concentrated on mutual funds and publicly traded stocks. In contrast, HNI clients’ AUM is ₹1-25 crore, with average AUM close to ₹3 crore in the last year and a half of our buildout,” he says.

Growth beyond metros

If business models are evolving, so is the geography of growth.

“We’re seeing serious participation from tier 2 and tier 3 cities,” says Shankar. “Wealth creation is no longer concentrated in metros. The next chapter of Indian wealth generation will be far more distributed geographically.”

Data from Dezerv offers a more granular view. On its platform, 24 per cent of users come from tier-1 cities, 10 per cent from tier-2 and tier-3, and the rest from other centres. But the more interesting insight pertains to behaviour. Investors outside tier-1 cities tend to take on a higher exposure to mid-cap, small-cap, and thematic funds, indicating greater risk appetite as well as growing confidence.

At the same time, cost-awareness and adoption of direct mutual fund plans are near identical across geographies — challenging the assumption that small-city investors lag in sophistication. “The average number of funds held is almost identical across tiers,” says Jethwani. “When the experience is the same, the behaviour converges.”

This convergence is critical, suggesting that wealth-tech platforms can scale up nationally without rethinking product design, provided they solve for trust and consistency.

Expensive growth

Yet, beneath the growth narrative lies a sobering reality.

Customer acquisition has become harder and more expensive in a crowded digital ecosystem. “There was a phase where growth was the headline metric. Today, quality of growth matters more — retention, revenue quality, user depth, trust,” says Shankar.

When markets rally, retail participation surges. When volatility hits, engagement drops — particularly among users who treat platforms as execution tools rather than long-term partners.

The divergence is becoming a defining fault line. “Guided customers tend to stay steady. Purely transactional customers tend to disappear,” Shankar adds. Dezerv, which focuses on higher-ticket business, reports near 100 per cent retention — underscoring the stickiness of advisory-led relationships.

The implication is clear: the next phase of wealth-tech growth will be driven not just by onboarding numbers but also the depth of engagement and longevity of relationships.

From access to outcomes

India’s wealth-tech sector stands at an inflection point.

The first decade was about breaking barriers — making markets accessible, affordable, and digital. The next will be about delivering outcomes: helping investors navigate complexity, avoid behavioural pitfalls, and build sustainable wealth over time.

As Singh puts it, the sector’s growth is driven by “the need for accessible, low-cost wealth management and advisory solutions”.

In that sense, the real opportunity for wealth-tech startups is not just in bringing more Indians to the market but in also ensuring they stay, grow, and succeed within it.

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Published on April 27, 2026