In her final year of engineering college in Bhopal, Smriti Tomar spent her days in class, her evenings at an internship, and her nights reading John Bogle and picking apart the annual reports of listed Indian companies. She was earning about ₹25,000 a month and putting almost all of it into the market. Friends started coming to her for stock tips, which said less about her ability than about the country she lived in. Sound confident about money in India and people treat you as an expert, because there is nobody else to ask.
Smriti Tomar is the founder and CEO of Stack Finance, the Bengaluru investing app built for Gen Z that raised $4.5 million in December 2021 from Y Combinator, Harvard Management and Goodwater Capital. Today the company operates as Stack Wealth, a SEBI-registered, fixed-fee wealth manager, and it sells to a customer almost nothing like the one it started with.
Who is Smriti Tomar, and what is Stack Finance?
Tomar graduated in electronics and communication engineering from MANIT Bhopal, better known as NIT Bhopal. She planned on an MBA. Instead she moved to Delhi and joined EXL as a business data analyst, working on Citibank’s Mexican operation, Banamex.
Stack Finance began in 2020 and was incorporated in 2021 as StackFin Technology Private Limited, with Tushar Vyas, an IIT Delhi graduate, alongside her as co-founder, joined by Yashwardhan Pauranik and Vidit Varshney in the founding team. The product was an investing app for Gen Z and millennials that built a portfolio around your goals and then ran it for you.
Why did she quit a bank job after 11 months?
Delhi introduced her to founders, and founders made the bank look slow. Work she thought was useful disappeared into approval chains. She wanted to see the effect of what she did, and inside a large financial institution she could not.
She lasted about 11 months, quit at 22 or 23, and gave up the MBA. What she had not priced in was the industry she was walking into.
Financial services, as they say, is the area of grey hair. It’s dominated by gray hair.
That is the standard problem for a young fintech founder in India: the licences, the compliance, the banking partners, and a set of gatekeepers who have been doing this since before you were born.
What was the first version of Stack, and why was it scrapped?
Not the app it became. The first idea was a cheap way for Indians to invest in foreign markets, which ran straight into remittances. Remittances were slow and expensive, so she went looking for a way around them, and in 2018 and 2019 the fashionable answer was blockchain: convert rupees to crypto, move the crypto, convert back.
The team built a real MVP, front end and back end, and talked to overseas brokers and blockchain settlement players. Then it collapsed, not on the economics but on the rules. Building anything on blockchain in India at the time meant no banking partner would touch you.
I went in with zero plan. I mean, I had no planning whatsoever.
So they stripped out both the blockchain and the overseas ambition and looked at what was left, which was the far duller and far larger problem of Indians not knowing what to buy at home. Retail investing was exploding. Execution had been solved by India Stack and by apps like Paytm Money. Strategy had not. As Tomar put it, you could see all the options; what to pick was still your problem.
How much has Stack Finance raised, and who backed it?
The first cheque was about half a million dollars from a handful of angels and one VC. Then came Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 batch, which she credited less for the money than for partners who would tell her plainly when she was wrong, something she said Indian investors rarely did.
In December 2021 Stack announced a $4.5 million seed round led by Y Combinator, Harvard Management, Goodwater Capital, Soma Capital, Uncommon Capital and Earlsfield Capital, with AngelList, Magic Fund, Cleo Capital, Chandaria Capital and others participating, and angels including Immad Akhund of Mercury and Tanuj Shori of Square Yards. A further undisclosed round in March 2022 brought in Kunal Shah of Cred. Total disclosed funding sits at roughly $4.5 to $5 million.
At the time of the interview, Tomar expected a Series A of $30 to $40 million within six to eight months. It never came. That matters less as a judgment than as a constraint, because everything the company did next happened without it. Founders who have built fintechs on their own cash flow, like Suresh Darak at Bondbazaar, will recognise the shape of the problem.
What did the Gen Z wealth app actually do?
You opened the app and set a goal. A phone in six months. A car in two years. A house in four. Stack asked for a target amount and a date, built a portfolio to match, and showed you a projection of how likely you were to get there.
Then it made saving feel like a game. Boost let you throw a bonus at a goal. A payday challenge skimmed money the day your salary landed. Set and Forget worked like an SIP. A 52-week challenge stepped your savings up every week. Good behaviour earned Stack Coins, redeemable at ten coins to the rupee. Underneath sat what the team called the Smart Stack Approach, a portfolio engine Tomar described as built on a Nobel-winning algorithm used by robo-advisers worldwide, rebalanced quarterly with the user’s consent.
The most unusual choice was the one that cost the most. Instead of a chatbot, Stack recorded videos of real people explaining what was happening and why, with Tomar herself fronting the onboarding.
It’s easier to trust a product when you know who’s behind it and that person is not shying away from interacting with the users.
The gamification instinct was not hers alone. Manish Maryada built Fello on the same read of Gen Z savings behaviour, and the category was crowded with people betting that young Indians would save if it felt like play.
How big did Stack Finance get?
The closed beta ran with 5,000 to 10,000 users. Three or four months after opening to the public, the base had crossed 50,000, and Tomar said the company had not spent a rupee on marketing. Users had set more than ₹100 crore worth of goals on the platform. Of the recurring transactions scheduled, more than 95% were going through; she counted 15 to 18 cancellations in total and had personally called most of those users to find out why.
Her targets for the following six months were a million users, 60% of them first-time or tier two and three investors, and $100 million of goals on the platform.
Her advantage, she argued, was that she was the customer.
I am the end user. I am not an HNI.
Why did Stack Finance become Stack Wealth?
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Stack Finance and Stack Wealth are the same company. StackFin Technology Private Limited traded as Stack Finance from 2021 and had rebranded to Stack Wealth by 2024, and the customer changed along with the name.
The company now describes itself as a modern wealth manager for ambitious professionals, built for India’s emerging affluent. It is registered with SEBI as an investment adviser under INA000021313 and with AMFI under ARN 171554, charges a fixed fee rather than commissions, and puts human wealth managers in front of clients alongside the software. It sells curated mutual fund portfolios, direct stocks, thematic baskets and a portfolio tracker called Vault, with a chief investment officer who is a chartered accountant with 25 years in capital markets. The head office moved from Bengaluru to Andheri in Mumbai. The coins and the 52-week challenge are gone from the pitch.
There is a logic to it that Tomar had already voiced in 2022, when she described banks offering her a wealth manager the moment she raised money.
Nobody came to me when I was working. Nobody came to me when I was an employee.
The Gen Z app was built to fix that. Stack Wealth, four years on, is aimed at people who now clear the bar.
The financials are early. Company filings compiled by Inc42 put Stack Wealth’s FY25 revenue at ₹51.7 lakh, down from ₹91 lakh in FY24. It is a common position for a fixed-fee advisory business rebuilding its model, and it is a long way from the numbers that surround profitable fintechs at scale, such as Gaurav Mathur’s SafeGold.
What happened with the viral video in January 2025?
In January 2025 a video of Tomar in a heated exchange with employees over unpaid dues circulated widely on Indian social media. In it, an employee presses her about a pending full-and-final settlement; she calls him stupid, and he responds that this is not the way to speak to an employee.
Mint reported that the argument followed the termination of a group of employees on 4 January, and that settlements had been tied to sales targets. A former employee posted publicly on LinkedIn alleging that his December salary had been withheld. The clip was picked up by Mint, Indian Startup News and several other outlets, most of which framed it around the company’s best-known backer, Kunal Shah.
No public response from Tomar or Stack Wealth has been reported since.
What is Stack Wealth today?
A live, SEBI-registered advisory business with an app on both stores, a small team, and a customer it did not set out to serve. The company that wanted a million Gen Z first-time investors now sells to India’s emerging affluent, and the founder who built the product because she was the user is no longer quite the user.
Whether that is a pivot or a retreat depends on what happens next. What is not in dispute is that Smriti Tomar started with an insight most Indian investors would recognise, that knowing what to buy is harder than buying it, and has spent six years trying to sell the answer to somebody.
Sources
Investment Startup Stack Raises $4.5 Mn From Y Combinator, Harvard Management, Others, Inc42
Viral Video: Kunal Shah-backed Stack Wealth’s CEO calls employee ‘stupid’, withholds salary, Mint