Online stock trading major Zerodha and wealth management platform Smallcase have announced a joint venture to launch an asset management company focussing on building a low-cost passive mutual fund products.

“While awaiting the final approval of our AMC (mutual fund), we asked if we should build it ourselves or collaborate. Given the 6+ years of experience that @smallcaseHQ has in building investment products, it made perfect sense to create a joint venture (JV) to build the AMC,” Nithin Kamath, CEO Zerodha said in a twitter post. 

Read more: All you need to know about smallcases

Nithin added that what worked well in the journey of Zerodha was to collaborate instead of trying to build everything ourselves. “It started with Kite Connect APIs that allowed startups to build on top of us (broking as a service). It led to @Rainmatterin & our first partnership @smallcaseHQ,” he said. 

Responding to Kamath’s tweet, Vasanth Kamath, founder of Smallcase, said, “Very excited for @smallcaseHQ to partner with @zerodhaonline to help introduce a new generation of investors to mutual funds. The upcoming AMC will be a joint venture between Zerodha & smallcase and will use learnings & shared values from both cos to build an enduring fund house.”

Smallcase Technologies is a financial technology company building a platform for direct indexing and model portfolios of stocks & ETFs known as smallcases. Amazon Inc’s first investment in India’s wealth management sector was in Smallcase in 2021. Other investors in the company include Zerodha, Faering Capital, and Premji Invest, among others.