How will you benefit from investing early in mutual funds?

“Give a man a fish, he eats one day. Teach him fishing, he eats forever — this Bible verse has been the driving force behind Vivek Bajaj’s mission to spread financial awareness. The co-founder and director of StockEdge & Elearnmarkets wants to empower retail investors with financial knowledge and at the same time provide them with handy tools to apply the learning in the real world. His firm Kredent InfoEdge ,which promotes three products — StockEdge, Elearnmarkets and StockEdge Club —  has recently raised Rs 10 crore growth capital from Kotak Securities to expand product capabilities, increase the user reach and arrange a platform to execute market transactions.

“The collaboration with Kotak Securities is a great value addition. We wanted to add a transaction engine in our platform. So it makes sense for us to connect with an established broker, which has a strong broking business and a backing of an insurance firm and a bank etc. We can tap their customer base and they can get more customers via us, thus leveraging each other’s strengths. We aspire to create an ecosystem which can serve as an investor’s complete journey from learning (through elearnmarkets), research and data analytics (through StockEdge), collaboration (through StockEdge Social), and transaction,” says Bajaj.

Financialising India

Kredent InfoEdge has three products having separate applications (apps).

1. i)Elearnmarkets – Elearnmarkets is a financial education platform with over 1 million learners and more than 200 market experts hosting finance courses in multiple languages. “It has grown 100 per cent in a year,” says Bajaj. The company has launched Rs 999 specialised programs, especially for children and women willing to learn about the stock market.

NSE-certified capital markets programs and webinars having micro modules such as concepts of fundamentals and technicals are the most popular courses on Elearnmarkets.

1. ii) StockEdge: StockEdge is a stock analytics platforms that has seen2 million downloads. It has active user base of over 500,000 people. The premium offering on StockEdge includes readymade strategies and investment ideas, concall summaries and stock case studies. “Retail investors do not get easy access to data. We have democratised the data for them,” he says.

iii) StockEdge Club: It is a paid membership that works on analysts-as-a-service model. “We have recruited Sebi-certified research analysts who you can approach for basic and advanced queries on real-time basis. There are 2500-plus members on StockEdge Club,” Bajaj says.

The company now has plans to convert StockEdge Club into a social investing platform along with a transaction engine. The platform will host multiple intermediaries such as investment advisors and analysts and will operate on a freemium model.

Kredent InfoEdge was co-founded by Vivek Bajaj, Vineet Patawari and Vinay Pagaria. The company had earlier raised capital from investors like Ramesh Damani, IndiaMart founder Shri Dinesh Agarwal and others.