Y Combinator-backed saving and investment app Gullak announced on January 19 that it has raised $3 million in funding as part of its seed round from new investors YC and Rebel partners and existing investor Better capital.
Other investors that participated in the funding round include Good water capital, GMO fintech fund, TRTL ventures and angel investors - Kunal Shah (Cred), Akshay Mehrotra and Ashish Goyal (Early salary), and Kevin Moore, among a few others.
Gullak had earlier raised $1.3 million as part of its pre-seed round led by Better capital and some angel investors, including Vimal Kumar and Sheetal Lalwani (Co-founders at JusPay), Ramanathan RV (Co-founder at Hyperface), Nitin Gupta (Founder and CEO at UniCards) and Prasanna Sankar (Co-founder at Rippling) among others.
The startup will utilise the funds to increase average revenue per unit (ARPU) by offering unique financial products, strengthening the current product, and also to expand its user base. It also plans to make investments in building a strong community and spreading financial awareness.
Founded by former JusPay executives Manthan Shah and Dilip Jain, and Naimisha Rao, Gullak is a platform that helps automate savings. Through this app, users can save small amounts on a regular basis, and automatically invest that in digital gold. It also allows users to lease their Gold to get extra 5 percent returns every year on top of the annual gold returns through its latest offering Gullak Gold+. With this launch, Gullak has become the first B2C app in India to give users an extra 5 percent returns.
“A classic representation of a founding team that we love at Better - product, engineering and growth co-founders who are obsessively focussed on rapid iteration to unlock PMF. We are excited to be founding stage investors in Gullak as they make wealth creation easy for 200M Indians and have been thrilled to see the quality of traction already”, said Vaibhav Domkundwar of Better Capital, an early backer of breakout fintechs like Slice, Open, M2P and others.
The app that was launched seven months ago has grown from 2 Lakh daily GTV to 22 Lakh daily GTV. This is projected to grow to 1 crore daily GTV by August 2023. Forty percent of their user acquisitions are from organic and referral channels which they aim to take to 60 percent while growing the GTV in order to build a sustainable business, the startup said in a release.
“We are driven by our vision to democratise wealth creation while working on all the three pillars of a sustainable business - Acquisition, retention and monetization - at the same time. All our initiatives have this as the underlying core. For instance, our recent offering Gullak Gold+ has allowed us to move to a four-digit ARPU which has been a struggle for most companies in this space,” said Manthan Shah, Co-founder, Gullak.
We have also doubled our GTV after the launch of Gold+ with 0 marketing dollars and are hoping to see great retention numbers as well through this offering. We have just begun and the journey ahead seems exciting," Shah added.