While the tech-savvy generation seems to have adopted digital banking pretty well, regular investing is still to become a part of their lives.
Odisha-based fintech startup Numbr is trying to enable these millennials to start saving and investing as early as possible.
Numbr is a micro-investing app that helps to save and invest everytime you spend. The app works on round-up concept. It rounds-up spent amount to the nearest Rs. 10 and invests the spare change in a diversified mutual fund portfolio.
Launched in November, 2021 by Asish Das, Sudhakar Pradhan and Sazzad Hussain, Numbr aims to make investing for millennials effortless. The app is now in beta, available to everyone to give it a try.
With Numbr, you can start investing in mutual funds with small amount of money, even as low as Rs. 1.
Why build Numbr?
It started back in November, 2020 when the team realized with banks constantly reducing savings account interest rates, there should be a better way to keep their money.
Millennials in India start investing either in mid or late twenties and lose the interest they could have earned if they started early.
And last but not the least, COVID taught everyone the importance of an emergency fund.
The Sooner, the Better
With round-up investing, Numbr is targeting the 60 Cr. Indian millennails. The team believes that the earlier you start investing, the more compound interest can work in your favour.
Security and trust
Data security and trust remains the biggest user concern in Fintech apps. Numbr follows the best security practices to ensure user data & transactions are safe. It’s servers are hosted on AWS and all data transfers are encrypted using the AES-256 standard.
Numbr has partnered with big names like Bombay Stock Exchange(BSE), ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund and Signzy.
The team
Numbr is co-founded by Asish Das, a second time Fintech founder and former business manager at car rental startup Zoomcar. Asish’s NFC enabled payment system startup IndiaPay was featured on NDTV startup reality show ‘Quest For The Next Big Online Business Idea’.
Sudhakar founded ‘Digikart’, an e-commerce platform for rural India in 2014. He has worked as the business head at Allevents where he built a community of over 1 million event organizers.
Sazzad’s first tech startup F9X served clients from over 10 countries in cyber security. With over a decade of experience in software development and security testing, he has helped companies like Ola and Dell fix security vulnerabilities.
Building fintech startup from a Tier-II city
Numbr is based in Bhubaneswar, capital of Odisha and one of the very few startups in Fintech space from the state.
It’s tough, the team says. The biggest issue is the accessibility to the talent pool. You can’t convince talents to come to a Tier-II city from cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad to work with you. However, with the pandemic we were able to get some good folks to join the team remotely.