Yenmo Is Rewiring How India's 65 Million Investors Borrow Money

Yenmo, a Y Combinator Winter 2024 company, is offering a third door to the tens of millions of Indians who have diligently built up portfolios of mutual funds and stocks and face a familiar problem the moment they need cash. Their options are both bad: liquidate the investments they have spent years compounding, or take a personal loan at 18% or more.

Founded and based in Bengaluru, India, Yenmo lets investors digitally pledge their mutual fund and equity holdings as collateral and get an instant loan at interest rates starting at 9.89% and going up to a maximum of 10.49%. No paperwork, no branch visits, and, crucially, no need to sell the underlying investment. The asset continues to grow in the market even while it is collateralized, which means borrowers are not forced to choose between short-term liquidity and long-term compounding. For India’s estimated 65 million retail investors, that distinction is financially significant, and for many families, it is the difference between meeting a medical bill or a tuition deadline without derailing years of financial planning.

The company was founded by Ashutosh Purohit and Aryan Agarwal, two operators with unusually direct exposure to the problems Yenmo is tackling. Purohit previously led the creation and growth of Navi’s mutual fund arm, where he scaled assets under management from zero to roughly $625 million in a single year. Before that, he spearheaded Swiggy’s expansion from 30 to 500 cities over eighteen months. Agarwal brings a combined background in finance and technology, and has spent his career working on products at the intersection of the two. Their shared conviction is straightforward: India’s retail-investment boom has outpaced the lending infrastructure built around it, and that gap is large enough to build a category-defining company inside of.

The product sits squarely in the fast-growing secured consumer lending space, a category that has drawn significant attention from Indian regulators and investors alike. Loans against securities have historically been the domain of private banks catering to high-net-worth clients, with minimum ticket sizes and document requirements that effectively locked out the mass-affluent segment. Yenmo is building the digital rails to serve that broader base: the software engineer with a mutual fund SIP, the doctor with an equity portfolio, the first-generation investor who would never walk into a private banking office. By pricing loans at rates roughly half those of comparable unsecured personal loans, Yenmo is both meaningfully cheaper and meaningfully more responsible for the borrower.

Yenmo is still a small team, five people at the time of its YC batch, but it is operating in a market with enormous structural tailwinds. India’s retail investor base has more than doubled since 2020. Regulatory infrastructure for digital pledging and demat-linked lending has matured. And cultural attitudes toward using investments as collateral, rather than selling them in a pinch, are beginning to shift, largely because products like Yenmo are making the alternative visible for the first time.

If the company executes, the impact goes beyond its own loan book. Yenmo is quietly building what many Indian fintechs have talked about but few have delivered: a genuinely cheaper, more transparent form of consumer credit, underwritten by assets borrowers already own.