Vested Finance has crossed roughly ₹8,300 crore in assets on a platform whose entire pitch is helping Indians buy shares of companies listed thousands of kilometres away, in New York. Yet the Indian company that carries the brand, Vested Services Private Limited, booked only about ₹6.38 crore of revenue in FY25. That gap — a billion-dollar pool of client money sitting behind a small Indian balance sheet — is not an accounting error. It is the whole design of cross-border investing, and it explains where Vested actually makes its money.
The company was started in 2018 by four classmates who met at the University of California, Berkeley, none of whom set out to build an Indian fintech. They noticed a lopsidedness in their own portfolios and turned it into a product. Seven years later the platform says more than 4 lakh investors have routed over ₹10,000 crore into US stocks, ETFs and, since October 2025, global mutual funds — even as India’s tax rules on sending money abroad grew steadily heavier. This is how a niche idea about geographic diversification became a regulated, GIFT City-licensed business, and where it is fragile.
Quick facts
| Company | Vested Finance (US: Vested Finance, Inc. / VF Securities, Inc.; India: Vested Services Private Limited) |
| Founded | 2018 (US entity); India entity Vested Services incorporated 9 July 2019 |
| Founder(s) | Viram Shah (co-founder & CEO), Darwin Arifin, Eric Huynh, Yinghan Lin |
| Businesses | US stocks & ETFs, global mutual funds, managed portfolios and private markets for Indian residents and NRIs |
| Latest FY revenue (India entity) | About ₹6.38 crore in FY25 (Vested Services Private Limited) |
| Latest FY profit/loss (India entity) | Loss-making in its early filed years (FY21 net loss about ₹1.0 crore); recent bottom line not reliably disclosed |
| Listed | Private |
| Assets / last valuation | Assets under administration about ₹8,300 crore (about $1 billion), as reported April 2026; total funding reported between about $16 million and $26 million |
| Regulation / CEO | SEC-registered adviser and FINRA/SIPC broker-dealer in the US; IFSCA-licensed at GIFT City; CEO Viram Shah |
What they do
Vested Finance sells access to markets that Indian investors cannot easily reach through a domestic broker: US-listed shares, US and global ETFs, and, more recently, international mutual funds. The customer is an Indian resident using the Reserve Bank of India’s Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS), or a non-resident Indian who wants a compliant way to hold global assets. The core promise is fractional ownership — you can buy a sliver of a share for as little as $1 — so a saver in Pune can own a fraction of Apple or an S&P 500 ETF without needing the full share price in dollars.
- Product lines: US stocks and ETFs (10,000+ instruments, per the company); curated baskets and managed portfolios; global mutual funds; and access to private markets.
- Users: Indian residents remitting under LRS, plus NRIs across 50+ countries the platform says it serves.
- Entry point: fractional investing from $1, aimed at first-time global investors rather than only high-net-worth clients.
The origin
The founding insight came from the founders’ own portfolios. Viram Shah, Darwin Arifin, Eric Huynh and Yinghan Lin met at UC Berkeley — Shah was doing an MBA at the Haas School of Business — and came from India, Indonesia and Hong Kong. They noticed that a typical American investor holds a slice of international equities almost by default, while their own wealth was concentrated entirely in their home countries. The imbalance was not a lack of appetite; it was a lack of plumbing. Buying a US share from India meant navigating foreign brokerage accounts, wire transfers and paperwork that most retail savers would never attempt.
Shah’s background shaped the fix. Before Berkeley he had studied engineering at the University of Mumbai and worked on JP Morgan’s investment banking team across Mumbai and Hong Kong, so he understood both the compliance machinery and the retail gap. Arifin had led process development and project work at Sandia National Laboratories and Intel, bringing the engineering discipline to build the pipes. The bet was simple: package the messy cross-border chain — KYC, remittance, a US brokerage account, fractional execution — into an app that felt like any Indian investing app. Vested launched to Indian users in 2019, and the timing, just before a pandemic that would make people rethink where their savings sat, turned out to matter.
The struggle years
Cross-border investing is a business where the product can work perfectly and the government can still move the ground beneath it. Vested’s hardest years were less about technology and more about rules and rivals.
The first squeeze came from the depository chain that platforms like Vested relied on to hold US shares for Indian customers. Through 2020 and 2021 the category saw operational wobbles — account-opening pauses and settlement frictions at the custody layer — that reminded users this was a stack of intermediaries, not a single broker. The second, and bigger, blow was fiscal. In the Union Budget 2023 the government raised Tax Collected at Source (TCS) on LRS remittances from 5% to 20% for amounts above the threshold, effective 1 October 2023. Overnight, sending money abroad to invest became more expensive to fund, even though the TCS is a credit an investor can reclaim when filing returns. For a business whose entire funnel begins with an outbound remittance, a 20% up-front cash drag on larger transfers is a direct headwind on deposits.
Layered on top was competition. Vested was early, but INDmoney, Groww and others pushed into US investing, compressing fees and raising customer-acquisition costs in exactly the segment Vested pioneered. Being first is not the same as being safe.
The turning point
The turn was not a single funding cheque; it was the moment client assets compounded into something that looked like scale, and the moment Vested moved its regulatory base onshore. On the assets side, the platform reported an early inflection during the pandemic — a roughly ten-fold jump in assets under management over nine months, described in June 2020 — as first-time investors rushed to hold US tech names. That early curve set the pattern.
The structural turn came later, at GIFT City. Vested became an authorised Global Access Provider and broker-dealer at GIFT City, regulated by India’s IFSCA, giving it an India-based, India-regulated route for cross-border investing rather than depending solely on offshore rails. That licence is what made the October 2025 launch of global mutual funds possible: Vested positioned itself as the first platform to let Indian retail investors buy international mutual fund schemes directly, from a $10 minimum, across 50+ schemes domiciled in GIFT City and Luxembourg from managers including BlackRock, Vanguard, DSP, Goldman Sachs, Franklin Templeton and Morgan Stanley. By April 2026 the platform reported assets under administration of about ₹8,300 crore (about $1 billion) — the number on one side of the turn versus a niche product on the other.
The money behind it
Vested has been venture-funded rather than debt-heavy, with a spread of institutional and angel backers. The headline round is the Series A.
- Series A: $12 million, announced April 2022, led by Ayon Capital, to expand the team and build cross-border products (company press release, April 2022).
- Continuing investors in that round: Ovo Fund, Wedbush Ventures, Inflection Point Ventures (IPV), Tenoneten and Upscale.
- New backers in the Series A: 9Unicorns, plus angels including Ankur Warikoo and finance content creators, per the company’s announcement.
- Total raised: reported between about $16 million (Inc42) and about $25.8 million across 9–10 rounds (Tracxn) — sources disagree, so treat the total as a range rather than a settled figure.
- Valuation: no reliable, recent post-money valuation is publicly confirmed; figures circulating on aggregator sites are inconsistent and are not used here.
What the money changed: the Series A funded the team build-out and the cross-border product roadmap that later produced managed portfolios, private-markets access and the GIFT City-routed global mutual funds.
How it makes money
This is where the opening contradiction resolves. The economics of a cross-border broker are split across entities, and most of the revenue sits offshore, not in the Indian company.
- US entities do the regulated heavy lifting: VF Securities, Inc. is the FINRA/SIPC broker-dealer that executes US stock and ETF trades, and Vested Finance, Inc. is the SEC-registered investment adviser behind managed portfolios and private markets.
- India entity (Vested Services Private Limited) largely provides technology, marketing and customer-facing services — which is why its filed revenue is small relative to platform assets.
- Fee lines the company publishes: a free basic tier plus an optional premium subscription at about ₹4,500 per year (about ₹375 per month); a platform fee on global mutual fund transactions of 0.25%, reduced to 0.15% for monthly-plan subscribers; and standard currency-conversion and bank charges on remittances.
- The part people get wrong: assets under administration (about ₹8,300 crore) are client money, not company revenue. A platform can custody a billion dollars and still run a lean India P&L, because take rates on passive, low-cost global investing are thin and much of the fee stack is booked in the US broker-dealer.
The numbers
Public financials for Vested are limited to the Indian entity, Vested Services Private Limited, and they capture only part of the platform’s economics. The reliable, sourced data points are below; where later-year figures are not consistently disclosed, they are left out rather than estimated.
| Metric (₹ crore, India entity) | FY20 | FY21 | FY25 |
| Revenue | ~0.11 | ~1.8 | ~6.38 |
| Net profit / (loss) | n/a | (1.0) | not reliably disclosed |
- FY20 to FY21: revenue rose from about ₹11 lakh to about ₹1.8 crore, an early-stage jump off a tiny base, with a net loss of about ₹1.0 crore in FY21 (Inc42, citing filings).
- FY25: India-entity revenue of about ₹6.38 crore (Inc42 / Tracxn company profile).
- FY22–FY24: aggregator tables for these years are internally inconsistent (in one, reported net profit exceeds revenue), so they are excluded here rather than reproduced.
- Platform scale is better read from assets and volumes than from the India P&L: about ₹8,300 crore assets under administration (April 2026) and, as the company states, more than ₹40,000 crore of cumulative trading volume (as of December 2025).
Where the money comes from
- By product: the base is US stocks and ETFs; managed portfolios and, from October 2025, global mutual funds and private markets are the newer layers meant to lift fee income per user.
- By geography of the customer: Indian residents remitting under LRS form the core, with a meaningful NRI cohort the company says spans 50+ countries.
- By geography of the revenue: this is the surprise. The client money is Indian, but the fee-earning execution and advisory sit in the US entities (VF Securities and Vested Finance, Inc.), so the Indian company’s reported revenue understates the platform’s true gross economics.
- Scale markers (company-stated): 4 lakh+ investors, ₹10,000 crore+ invested through the platform, and app-store ratings around 4.7 — useful directionally, but company figures rather than audited disclosures.
The risks
- Regulatory and tax risk (the biggest): the business begins with an outbound remittance, so LRS rules set the ceiling. The 20% TCS on LRS above the annual threshold, effective 1 October 2023, raises the up-front cost of funding an account; any tightening of LRS limits or fresh curbs on retail overseas investing would hit deposits directly.
- Currency and market concentration: customers take on rupee-dollar exchange risk on the way in and out, and the demand skews heavily to US large-cap tech. A sharp dollar move or a US drawdown can shrink both assets and trading activity at the same time.
- Competition and thin take rates: INDmoney, Groww and others compete on the same LRS funnel, and the shift toward low-cost passive products (ETFs, index-style global funds) keeps fees thin. Growth in assets does not automatically translate into fee income if the mix stays passive and price competition persists.
The takeaway
Vested’s story carries one transferable lesson: in cross-border finance, the winning product is regulatory access, not a slick interface. Anyone can build an app that lists US stocks; the durable moat is a compliant path for money to leave one country and settle in another, and the licences that keep it open. Vested’s real inflection was not a funding round or a feature — it was moving its base onshore to GIFT City, so that the next product, global mutual funds, could launch on rails it controlled rather than rented. When the government can reprice your entire funnel with a single line in a Budget, owning the plumbing is the strategy.
Frequently asked questions
What does Vested Finance do?
It is a platform that lets Indian residents and NRIs invest in US stocks and ETFs, global mutual funds, managed portfolios and private markets, with fractional investing from as little as $1.
Who founded Vested Finance and when?
It was founded in 2018 by Viram Shah, Darwin Arifin, Eric Huynh and Yinghan Lin, classmates connected through UC Berkeley. Viram Shah, a former JP Morgan investment banker with an MBA from Berkeley’s Haas School, is co-founder and CEO. The Indian entity, Vested Services Private Limited, was incorporated in 2019.
How much money has Vested Finance raised?
Its headline round is a $12 million Series A announced in April 2022, led by Ayon Capital. Total funding is reported inconsistently, roughly between $16 million and $26 million across 9–10 rounds, so it is best treated as a range.
How does Vested make money?
Through a premium subscription (about ₹4,500 per year), platform fees on global mutual fund transactions (0.25%, or 0.15% for plan subscribers), and currency-conversion and brokerage economics that are largely booked in its US broker-dealer, VF Securities, rather than in the Indian entity.
Is investing through Vested taxed in India?
Funding an account uses the Liberalised Remittance Scheme, and remittances above the annual threshold attract 20% TCS from 1 October 2023. TCS is a credit that can be claimed back when filing income tax returns; capital gains on the investments are taxed separately under Indian rules.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- PR Newswire — Vested Finance $12M Series A announcement (April 2022)
- Cafemutual — Vested Finance crosses AUM of ₹8,300 crore (April 2026)
- IBS Intelligence / Global Fintech Series — Vested Finance AUM jumps 10-fold (June 2020)
- Business Today — Vested Finance opens global mutual funds for Indian investors (October 2025)
- Business Standard — Vested opens global mutual fund access to retail investors (October 2025)
- Inc42 — Vested Finance company and financials profile (2026)
- Tracxn — Vested Finance / Vested Services Private Limited profile and funding (2026)
- YourStory — Silicon Valley startup Vested helps Indians buy US stocks (October 2019)
- Vested Finance blog — TCS on LRS increased to 20% (2023)
- Vested Finance — company website, India (vestedfinance.com/in), platform scale and product pages (2026)
Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.