This Wealth Tech Startup Believes AI Can Give Retail Investors Institutional Edge

For millions of retail investors, the stock market remains a complex maze of charts, ratios, analyst reports, and financial jargon. StockGro, an investment learning and advisory platform, is betting that AI can make that information more accessible and potentially change how people make investment decisions.

The Bengaluru-based company has built Stoxo, an AI-powered platform designed to answer stock-market questions by combining fundamental and technical analysis, analyst views, and market data. Unlike general-purpose AI assistants, StockGro says Stoxo is designed specifically for investment-related queries and can provide users with a structured rationale behind its recommendations.

Founder Ajay Lakhotia tells AIM that the idea emerged from observing a fundamental gap in how retail investors access financial knowledge. Conventional brokerage platforms provide investors with plenty of data but often leave them to interpret it themselves.

“99.9% of the capital, which is from retail participants, is managed by 0.01% of the population, which is the fund manager. And we have no idea how that fund manager is actually investing. And that’s the thought with which we have to democratise investment,” Lakhotia says.

The startup found it essential to pivot from a content-led investing platform into a research-first, AI-native platform. It has built Stoxo as a research desk that embeds multi-agent AI directly into the investment decision journey, bringing together market intelligence, expert insights, proprietary data, and community signals to help retail investors make more informed decisions.

The Inception and AI Pivot

According to Lakhotia, the problem begins with the lack of financial education and access to qualified advisers. Investors often depend on friends, relatives, or relationship managers for investment decisions rather than independently evaluating stocks or mutual funds.

His observations come from more than a decade in venture capital. Lakhotia began his career as an entrepreneur, spending about eight years in manufacturing and technology before moving to Europe, where he worked with Capgemini in London. 

After completing his MBA at ISB, he joined ICICI Bank’s investment banking team and later moved into venture capital, spending around five-and-a-half years at Vertex, the VC arm of Temasek. His portfolio included companies such as FirstCry, Yatra, and XpressBees. He later joined Fosun RZ Capital, the venture arm of Chinese conglomerate Fosun, where he invested in Delhivery, ixigo, and MakeMyTrip.

After spending over a decade investing in startups, Lakhotia says that he began noticing a much larger opportunity in public-market investing. In 2020, he founded StockGro to help users understand markets. It enables users to create portfolios, track stocks, and simulate investment strategies.

StockGro began developing the AI platform around a year and a half ago after finding that general-purpose AI models struggled to answer time-sensitive financial questions effectively.

“When you ask something on ChatGPT, it uses something called the SERP API. It goes back to Google, picks up the questions from there, answers from there, the top three, four articles, converts it to NLP, and presents it to you,” Lakhotia states.

The problem is that market information can quickly become outdated. Lakhotia argues that conventional brokerage platforms provide investors with plenty of data but often leave them to interpret it themselves.

The Tech Behind Stoxo

At the core of Stoxo is a proprietary small language model (SLM) built in-house and supported by more than 80 specialised AI agents, each designed for specific functions across inference, relevance, contextual analysis, and market research.

The platform draws on StockGro's proprietary conversational and behavioural data accumulated from its 35 million-user ecosystem over five years, alongside expert trade calls and real-time market data. 

“We have 35 million monthly active users, who are conversing with the RAs, RIAs, with each other on the platform. That conversational data, which helps us do the inference and also put out the right answer, does not exist outside my ecosystem,” he says.

A key differentiator is accessibility. StockGro says it has brought institutional-grade investment research to retail investors at 98% lower pricing than traditional industry alternatives.

The platform also aggregates calls from SEBI-registered advisers, allowing users to examine their recommendations, historical performance, accuracy and engagement with other investors. The company has also integrated brokers into the platform.

StockGro then combines multiple indicators into a single assessment, including valuation, earnings, risk, analyst views, technical indicators, and mutual-fund activity.

However, StockGro believes its biggest differentiator is not simply its AI models, but the behavioural and conversational data generated on its platform. It allows Stoxo to make its answers more specific to investment-related questions rather than producing generic financial explanations.

The 100-member company has been using Groq chipsets for complex inference workloads instead of NVIDIA infrastructure for roughly a year.

An Open Advisory Opportunity

Lakhotia believes the investment-advisory market remains relatively underserved. India’s broader asset and wealth management industry reached assets under management (AUM) of $0.9 trillion, per Deloitte. Meanwhile, there are more than 16,500 SEC-registered advisory firms in the US overseeing AUM of $177 trillion.

“The whole market is demarcated, where on one side you have brokers, and it’s a saturated market with Zerodha, Groww, Angel, etc. On the other side, the advisory market is completely untouched,”  he says.

The company has also partnered with around 1,500 business schools and colleges, where its platform is available as part of the curriculum.

StockGro has raised more than $90–95 million so far. Lakhotia said the company may look to raise another round around mid-next year.

Voice-Powered, Vernacular Investing

The next phase of Stoxo could be voice-based investing. The company is working on adding voice capabilities that would allow users to ask questions about the market or whether a particular stock is worth considering, and potentially execute trades through the platform.

The company is particularly interested in Indian-language AI platforms because it wants the experience to work beyond English-speaking users.

Stoxo has already demonstrated significant adoption and engagement since its launch, with 2 million users onboarded within six months and the platform processing more than 25 million research queries every month. 

According to StockGro, Stoxo has reduced the time required for investment research from more than four hours to under 10 seconds, while improving decision accuracy by 85% by reducing reliance on stale or unverified information. The platform has also seen 64% of users take a subsequent trade action after receiving Stoxo insights, compared with 43% following standard alerts, indicating stronger user engagement.

The company's larger ambition is to democratise access to investment intelligence—making sophisticated research faster, more affordable, and easier to understand for India's next generation of retail investors.