Stockal Raises $3 Mn In Pre-Series A Funding New investment to fuel expansion to South East Asia and development of new services tailored to each market

Stockal, the platform that enables global investments for Indians, on Thursday announced a $3 million in pre-Series A funding to support its rapid growth into newer markets. This will help the company become the platform of choice to invest in global markets across various asset classes.

The new funding brings the total investment to $5million since it was launched in January 2020.

Venture capital firms have been quick to take advantage of the new market that Stockal is pioneering, with a range of investors contributing to the company's pre-Series A funding. These include Aroa Ventures – an investment initiative of Ritesh Agarwal's (OYO Rooms founder) family office, Cadenza Capital Management, wealth management platform Kristal.ai, startup research platform Tracxn Labs, July Ventures and Credence Family Office.

"At Stockal, we are working towards our mission of democratizing global investing. Geographical boundaries should not be a constraint when you are looking at investing and participating in the global economy. With this strategic fund infusion, we will be able expand to multiple new capitalmarkets and offer unique and diversified asset classes to our customers. While we have established our presence in India significantly and currently manage over $100 million, we aim to capture a huge potential growth market of about $800 billion which includes MENA and SE Asia. We will also be innovating our product offering by adding fractionalizing and tokenizing different asset classes to make investing in global markets accessible to all. These new funds will help us enhance the platform as we build for a wider audience," said Vinay Bharathwaj, co-founder and co-chief executive officer, Stockal.

Stockal will use the funding to turbocharge its growth into new markets, starting from Indonesia in South East Asia. The company is also investing heavily in developing its service offering, such as its recently-launched Stacks portfolio management platform which enables users to choose from a range of carefully-tailored investment opportunities created by global asset management and wealth management companies such as GlobalX Funds.

"There is a glaring problem with international capital, which is that it's easy to spend money overseas but practically impossible to save internationally and invest in global growth stories outside your home market," stated Sitashwa Srivastava, co-founder and co- chief executive officer, Stockal. "We founded Stockal to open the best global capital markets to all global investors, enabling anyone to participate in investment opportunities anywhere in the world. This allows retail investors to access the full range of high-calibre companies, funds, and other interesting assets on a seamless and affordable fractional investing platform. With almost half-a-billion Dollars processed in just over a year, we have proven that there's huge demand. Now, we are partnering with high-quality investors, who are aligned with our vision, to go after the huge opportunity in front of us."

Stockal was founded with the aim to help India to have a stake in a variety of assets - including shares, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and hedge funds beyond domestic markets. This has opened up an avenue for retail investors to invest in stocks of large companies, starting at as low as $10 in fractional ownerships.

"There are enormous growth opportunities for any business that can truly democratise investment, and in just a few months Stockal has demonstrated the huge potential size of this new market. Our investment is recognition of the company's unique value proposition and its ambitious growth strategy to bring overseas investment to ever more markets around the world," mentioned Gaurav Gulati of ScaleX Partners.

Since January last year, Stockal has attracted over 60,000 users from India alone trading half a billion dollars-worth of assets and amassing nearly $100 million assets under management (AUM). The average investing account holds investments of around $5000 - 11,000, demonstrating how Stockal's fractional stock investment model opens asset ownership to a far wider pool of individual and retail investors, and enables banks and wealth managers to provide a range of new investment services for their customers.

"Cadenza strongly believes in the Stockal team and their ability to build a next generation brokerage that captures a high growth market opportunity by removing barriers that persist in access to global equity markets," added Kumar Dandapani, managing partner, Cadenza Capital Management.

Large financial institutions such as HDFC, Motilal Oswal, Geojit and dozens of wealth management and fintech outfits in India and the Middle East have partnered with Stockal to bring cross-border investments to their own customers.