Sometime in the mid 2000s, a management trainee at Future Group stood on the mezzanine of a supermarket in Nashik and watched people below him change direction.

The store had announced an offer. Spend 500 rupees, get a kilo of sugar free. Run the arithmetic and it is worth about one percent. Nobody in the store ran the arithmetic.

“It’s like 1% off. But the very fact that one kg of sugar is coming free, it feels substantial. And then you could see from the top how the whole movement of consumers inside the store rushes into it.”

The trainee was Mukesh Kalra. Fifteen years later he would build a company on the opposite proposition, that Indians should be told the actual arithmetic, and that a business could be built by being the only one in the room willing to say it.

Akshay Datt sat down with Kalra on Founder Thesis for a long conversation about two failures, one exit, and a decision to burn his own revenue line. Watch the full episode here →

Who is Mukesh Kalra?

Mukesh Kalra is the founder and CEO of ET Money. Before it he was on the founding team of InMobi in 2007, where he ran demand-side product for three years, and he co-founded the personal finance startup Moneysights in 2009 with Santosh Navlani. Moneysights was backed by Blume Ventures, angel investor Prasad Duvvuri, and InMobi’s Naveen Tewari, and was acquired by Times Internet in October 2014. Navlani went on to serve as COO of ET Money.

The two boxes every Indian financial services company falls into

Every fintech in India says it is solving for trust. Kalra is one of the few founders who stopped to work out why the mistrust exists in the first place.

His answer is a taxonomy with two boxes and no third. Every financial services provider selling to a retail investor is either commission led or transaction led. The agent selling you a regular mutual fund plan earns a cut of your money. The broker earns when you trade, which means the system wants you to trade. Neither has any stake in whether you end up better off.

His sharpest point is that this is not about bad people.

“A commission-led player will always keep selling you products with higher commission. Everything said and done, the business optimizes for revenue maximization. You cannot really stay away and say, no, I’ll be great to you but I’ll make less money. That’s a false alarm for consumers.”

This is a compensation problem wearing a branding problem’s clothes. No amount of advertising resolves it. It took Kalra two failures to work out what does.

What Mukesh Kalra learned building InMobi from the inside

In 2007 Kalra joined the founding team of what would become InMobi. At that point it was mKhoj, an SMS service that helped you find deals near you. It did not work, and the reason was more interesting than the failure. People already knew the deals around them. The pleasure was in the hunt, not the answer.

What followed is the part worth studying. In August the team knew the product was dead. In September they decided to become a mobile ad network. By December they had shipped version one. The trigger was somebody else’s published data that nobody in the market was reading. AdMob, later acquired by Google, was serving roughly 300 million ad impressions a month out of India and publishing geography-wise reports saying so. The market already existed, sitting in a PDF.

Then the money ran out.

“Naveen came and said he can’t give us salaries for a few months. We said okay, we’re into it. Then after three months he said, we need your credit cards as well. I said, dude, no salary, and now you’re taking away our credit cards also.”

They handed over the credit cards. InMobi went on to roughly 2 billion ad impressions a month and 50 to 100 million dollars of topline, growing from five people to 300 or 400 while Kalra ran demand-side product. He spent that period being mocked at Mumbai’s Mobile Mondays meetups by people asking where exactly the ads were supposed to go, given nobody was consuming content on phones.

Also read: How Srikrishna Swaminathan Built Factors.AI After Creating InMobi’s $100M Business Unit

Why Moneysights failed even though the idea was right

The second lesson cost more. In 2009 Kalra and Santosh Navlani started Moneysights on roughly the same problem statement ET Money would still be working on thirteen years later. They raised 250,000 dollars. It did not work, and his post mortem is the most portable idea in the conversation.

“You might have a very strong team, a great product, a great sounding board, could have raised more money. But if market power in that equation is zero, then everything gets multiplied to that.”

By market power he meant something narrow. He meant whether the market had shown up yet. Indians were online in 2009. They were not yet willing to do high-involvement financial transactions online.

Here is the part almost nobody admits publicly. The company stalled, the team dispersed, and Kalra went back to a salaried job at InMobi for two years while Moneysights sat on the back burner, still quietly processing transactions on autopilot. He was a founder with a company that was technically alive and functionally asleep. Times Internet acquired Moneysights in October 2014. Being early had cost him five years.

Also read: The Nature of Markets: How Apurv Agrawal Built SquadStack by Learning Not to Fight the Wind

Why ET Money sold to Times Internet instead of raising venture capital

By 2014 Kalra had two options. Raise venture money now that the market was real, or go inside Times Internet.

He chose the conglomerate against a four-part test. Trust, which the Times brand already had and which is close to unbuyable in financial services. A captive audience. Patient capital, because no financial services company has ever been built with impatient money. And complete entrepreneurial freedom. Underneath all of it sat a single governing idea.

“Three out of a hundred startups become huge companies. The odds are stacked against you. How do you take that 3 to 30 to 70 to 80, that’s how one has to look at it.”

The counterintuitive detail is what Times Internet did next. It charged ET Money full market rates for advertising in its own newspapers, with no internal discount, deliberately. Denied free media, ET Money had to build an actual growth engine, and ended up acquiring roughly 70 percent of its users through organic and referral channels. A subsidy would have produced a dependency instead.

Also read: How Ravi Saxena Built Wonderchef to ₹500 Crore Without Burning Venture Capital

Why ET Money stopped taking mutual fund commissions in 2018

In 2018 came the decision the whole company now rests on. ET Money stopped taking mutual fund commissions. Customers moved to direct plans and picked up roughly one percentage point of additional annual return. ET Money’s revenue from its core product went to zero.

What it built instead holds up. ET Money was the first in India to use video KYC for mutual fund investing, collapsing onboarding from a physical document verification visit to under a minute. It was among the first to run mutual fund transactions over UPI, and the first to enable Aadhaar-based SIPs. It was the fastest platform to reach 10 lakh monthly SIPs. Because cashbacks are prohibited on wealth products, Kalra could not buy users, which he describes as the best thing that happened to the business. The numbers back him: 94 percent annual retention, an average ticket of 22,000 rupees, and a typical user investing 1.2 to 1.4 lakh rupees a year.

By the time of the exit, ET Money tracked roughly 70,000 crore rupees in assets across about 900,000 transacting clients, with gross monthly sales above 1,200 crore and a SIP book of 450 crore rupees a month.

Then the regulator caught up. SEBI’s circular of 13 June 2023 created a regulatory framework for Execution Only Platforms, covering digital platforms that facilitate subscriptions, redemptions, and switches in direct plans of mutual funds. Category 1 EOPs act as agents of asset management companies and register with AMFI; Category 2 EOPs act as agents of investors and register as stock brokers. The framework took effect on 1 September 2023. The rulebook now drew the line Kalra had bet on five years earlier, separating pure transaction processing from genuine advice. ET Money took a Category EOP-1 licence for its transaction-only base and kept its RIA licence for advisory.

Also read: Making India Wealthier: Atul Shinghal of Scripbox

What ET Money Genius was, and what happened to the ₹600 crore target

This conversation was recorded in February 2022, nine days after ET Money launched Genius, a 249 rupee per month subscription that assessed your behavioural risk profile, built a dynamic asset allocation across equity, debt and gold, picked the specific funds and stocks, and rebalanced monthly using signals from around eleven global data vendors. No commission, no transaction fee, no cap on how much you invested.

“If a stock has grown 10x and it’s just 1% of your overall investment, even if it runs 20x, you’re not going to make any needle-moving impact.”
“If I give you all the gyaan around asset allocation, can you actually do it? No. So there has to be a system.”

On day one, a membership sold every five seconds. And then, on tape, Kalra gave Akshay his targets. Six hundred crore rupees of revenue by 2025. Two million Genius members. Hear him say it →

At the time of the acquisition, Genius had about 76,000 subscribers, and the two acquired entities reported combined FY24 revenue of roughly 31 crore rupees. Held against the ₹600 crore revenue target, that is the comparison that matters, and it is a wide miss. The ₹365.8 crore sale price is purchase consideration and sits on a different axis entirely, so it should not be read against either figure.

The distribution thesis, meanwhile, worked. Assets under tracking roughly tripled, the SIP book nearly doubled, and the YouTube channel grew from 300,000 to 440,000 subscribers without ever running a stock tip or an IPO segment. These are also standalone figures for the two acquired entities, and some economics may have sat inside Times Internet’s own books.

What did not scale was the subscription.

Who owns ET Money now?

360 ONE Wealth and Asset Management, formerly IIFL Wealth, owns ET Money. The June 2024 deal was disclosed through a stock exchange filing and valued the platform at ₹365.8 crore, paid as ₹85.8 crore in cash to Times Internet plus 3.5 million 360 ONE shares issued at ₹779.93 each. ET Money became a step-down subsidiary of 360 ONE, which advises more than 7,200 high and ultra-high net worth individuals with aggregate assets of around ₹4.67 lakh crore. Times Internet retained exposure through the shares it received.

ET Money was wholly owned by Times Internet before the sale, so no personal shareholding for Mukesh Kalra has ever been disclosed, and his net worth is not public. Public commentary at the time of the deal also flagged a structural question: a Genius customer under ET Money’s RIA licence cannot simultaneously be a distribution customer of 360 ONE, because SEBI prohibits providing advisory and distribution to the same client. Kalra and Santosh Navlani rejected the suggestion that ET Money would favour 360 ONE’s own products, citing those same rules.

Also read: Arjun Vaidya’s ₹144 Crore Exit: Revitalizing a 150-Year Legacy into a D2C Powerhouse

What the ET Money exit says about Indian wealthtech in 2026

The market Kalra spent fifteen years building for has now arrived in full. Industry assets under management stood at ₹85,75,657 crore as of 31 July 2026, a roughly sixfold increase over ten years. Monthly SIP contributions reached ₹31,961 crore in July 2026, up 12.28 percent year on year, and folios rose to 28.09 crore from 27.86 crore in June. SIP assets reached ₹18.19 lakh crore, about 21.2 percent of total industry AUM, supported by more than 10.6 crore contributing SIP accounts. Active equity funds took in ₹24,697.39 crore of net inflows in the month.

His exit also turned out to be the leading edge of a pattern. 360 ONE bought ET Money in June 2024. Groww bought Fisdom in May 2025. Incumbents are buying retail distribution rather than building it, and ET Money was Times Internet’s seventh exit in three years.

Also read: Tarun Mathur & Policybazaar: The Inside Story of Building a 70,000 Cr Market Cap Fintech

The diagnosis has never been refuted. Commission-led and transaction-led models really are misaligned with investor outcomes, and regulation keeps moving in his direction. The fixed-fee advisory cap now sits at 1,51,000 rupees per family per year, and investment advisers must disclose the extent to which AI is used in giving advice.

Which leaves the question the whole story turns on, and the one Kalra answered by building the experiment and letting it run. Indians will happily let a platform manage their money for free. Whether they will pay 249 rupees a month for someone to tell them what to do with it is, on the evidence so far, unsettled. He has been early before, and the last two times the market took five years to catch up.

Watch the full conversation with Mukesh Kalra on Founder Thesis → The episode covers the InMobi pivot, the five lost years at Moneysights, the decision to stop taking commissions, and the forecast he made on tape. New conversations with the founders shaping India’s startup ecosystem, every week.

More from Founder Thesis on fintech and wealth

Sources

360 ONE acquires ET Money for ₹366 crore, exchange filing detail — Startup77
360 ONE acquires ET Money to enter wealth tech space — M&A Critique
ET Money’s acquisition by 360 ONE: should you be worried or excited? — M&A Critique
360 ONE WAM forays into wealthtech — Hubbis
360 ONE WAM snaps up ET Money — Private Banker International
ET Money company history and Smartspends rebrand — Wikipedia
Indian mutual fund industry AUM, July 2026 — AMFI
SIP inflows hit ₹31,961 crore in July 2026 — ANI via The Tribune
AMFI mutual fund industry monthly data, July 2026 — EquityBulls
AMFI guidelines for Category 1 Execution Only Platforms — AMFI
SEBI’s Execution Only Platform framework explained — AZB & Partners

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