Kalpi, backed by Zerodha’s Rainmatter, uses AI and a no-code rule-builder to help everyday investors make decisions the way professional fund managers do, based on systems rather than WhatsApp forwards.
Ashwar Gupta’s work as a quantitative researcher at a U.S. hedge fund made him realize how sophisticated investors execute investment decisions backed by structured research, robust financial data, and elaborate systems. However, when he had discussions with his family and friends back in India, he found that this was not the case. The investment decisions made by ordinary investors were based solely on WhatsApp forwards, Telegram messages, YouTube recommendations, and gut feeling.
Rather than capital; it was a problem of access to the right tools and the discipline to use them. And this realization led Ashwar to change course, from a promising future in the institutional sector to founding Kalpi.
What Kalpi Actually Builds
Kalpi is a fintech platform that enables retail investors to build rule-based investment strategies without coding or costly datasets. Newbies can create their investment strategies from predefined templates. Experienced investors can set their own screening rules, distribution, portfolio weight, and rebalancing procedures.
Different agents are responsible for stock evaluation, portfolio analysis, and risk assessment, making the results more transparent and open to scrutiny.
Backing From Rainmatter
Kalpi has recently received its seed investment from Rainmatter, Zerodha’s fintech investment fund. The money will be directed toward hiring engineers and data scientists, developing financial data infrastructure, entering new markets, and providing investor education.
Gupta, a BITS Pilani engineering graduate who cleared all three CFA levels on his first attempt, runs two parallel businesses. KalpiQuant serves hedge funds, wealth managers, and brokers with advanced infrastructure, while Kalpi.ai makes a simplified version of those same capabilities available to individual investors.
One early user told him that Kalpi was the first time he felt he had a system rather than just opinions. For Gupta, that sentence captures the entire purpose of what he is building.
