Vasanth Kamath is co-founder and chief executive of smallcase, the Bengaluru investing platform that packages stocks and ETFs into theme-based portfolios. He started the company in 2015 with IIT Kharagpur friends Anugrah Shrivastava and Rohan Gupta after leaving research firm Tracxn, and Forbes India later named the trio to its 30 Under 30 list in finance.
Founding smallcase
In early 2015 he left Tracxn restless about building a finance product and called Shrivastava, then creating thematic products for institutional investors at Nomura. They brought in Gupta, a technology specialist at Goldman Sachs India. The three launched smallcase in July 2016 so retail investors could buy ready-made or custom baskets instead of picking single stocks. Early themes included GST, affordable housing, and digital India when few such packages existed for Indian retail investors.
Building the platform
Under his leadership smallcase partnered with brokers including Zerodha, Axis Capital, HDFC Securities, and Edelweiss Securities. Forbes India reported that the company had created dozens of its own portfolios while users built tens of thousands more. National Stock Exchange executive Ravi Varanasi has described smallcase as a tool that pushes investors toward diversification and portfolio thinking rather than single-stock bets. Kamath remains CEO of the Bengaluru firm as it has grown the thematic investing category in India.