BENGALURU: Former Google vice president Caesar Sengupta's startup Arta Finance has raised over $90 million from Sequoia Capital India, Ribbit Capital, Coatue, and over 140 tech and finance leaders, including Betsy Cohen, Eric Schmidt and Ram Shriram. During his time at Google, Sengupta played a key role in initiatives such as ChromeOS, Next Billion Users, and Google Pay. He left Google last year after a 15-year stint at the company.
Arta is unlocking access, personalisation, and connections that, until now, were available only to the ultrawealthy through their family offices. “AI has come to a point where it can help scale even things like investing. Wealth management is not well served by any single player. Your choices are usually manual, financial advisors who try to do it by themselves. We found that there's a very large space, 680 million people in the world with over $200 trillion in assets, each with wealth between $100,000 and a few million dollars,” Sengupta said.
He said a well-researched financial strategy shouldn’t be the monopoly of the ultra-rich, and Arta is breaking down barriers to sophisticated finance with technology.
He said Arta enables members to access opportunities like private equity, venture capital, private debt, and real-estate. Members can start with a $10,000 investment. Eligible Arta members can access a line of credit against their assets at industry leading rates. Arta’s AI-managed portfolios (AMPs) enable members to create highly personalised, automated portfolios that include stocks, bonds, options, leverage. “We all have our spreadsheets in which we keep all of our stuff, and we keep updating it. We realised that it's usually point products that will help you invest in private equity or real estate, or even just tax advice. That's why we are building a digital family office that will have some of our own products and some in partnership. In some ways, we bring in the right experts and connect our users to the right set of people,” he said.
Arta’s differentiator, Sengupta said, includes aligning interests with performance-based fees. Arta members will be able to choose performance-based pricing so they can align Arta’s incentives even more tightly with their goals.