Jodo: Re-Imagination Of Budgetary Financial Products From Scratch

Jodo Was Founded In January 2020 With A Mission To Positively Impact The Lives Of Middle-Income Households In Urban India

Startup Stories Taaza Tadka 22 April 2020

As you can guess from our profiles above, we all met each other while working at Matrix Partners, which is an early-stage VC fund. After working for a few years with the fund, where we were evaluating startups for investments, we decided to move from a career in investing to entrepreneurship.

Our stint at the fund gave us a ringside view of opportunities in the market along with the challenges of building a company. Both, the opportunity of building something large and impactful, and the challenges in doing the same motivated us to leave our jobs mid of last year. Given our background in financial services, we began researching opportunities in this space. Our research, for over 8 months, involving long primary interviews with over 1000 folks has culminated in what we have started to build at Jodo.

Jodo:

Jodo was founded in January 2020 with a mission to positively impact the lives of middle-income households in urban India through carefully tailored financial products. We believe that financial products are just a means to an end to meet the aspirations of an individual or a household. Through that lens, the best designed financial products are almost invisible, working underneath to ease the process of getting the job done. Currently, most financial products offered by formal financial institutions are disconnected from the end use-case of that financial product. Most products are one-size-fits-all offered to everyone with diverse needs, hence failing to fully meet the said needs.

Founding Team & Journey:

We are a three-member founding team. Our profiles are as follows:

1. Atulya Bhat

Education: IIT Madras, IIM Ahmedabad
Work Experience: Nomura, Goldman Sachs, Matrix Partners

2. Raghav Nagarajan

Education: IIT Kharagpur
Work Experience: Barclays, Edelweiss, Rupeevest (founder), Matrix Partners

3. Koustav Dey

Education: IIT Kanpur, IIM Bangalore
Work Experience: Morgan Stanley, Mckinsey, Matrix Partners

Our vision, therefore, is to re-imagine financial products from scratch keeping people’s lives in focus. The first product we have launched is to help households manage the school fee expense of their kids. During our research, we found that school fees have sharply increased in the last decade, especially in urban cities, and has become the largest and the most significant item of the household’s budget.

We have innovatively structured the product to offer financing for school fees at 0% interest to parents. We have partnered with multiple schools in Bangalore to offer this. We are, in parallel, working on both lending & saving products across use-cases like education and health, which matter most to people.