289. Meet the Founder Who Hit #1 on Finance App Charts With an AI Mortgage Assistant w/ Jinesh Vohra | Sprive

0:00Amardeep Parmar:Startups inside out, we've got Jinesh here today, who's now become a little celebrity, and you're building Sprive, so can you tell us what Sprive is?

0:06Jinesh Vohra:It's a free app that helps homeowners pay off their mortgages faster and save interest just by doing their everyday shopping.

0:12Amardeep Parmar:So some people might have seen you in Dragon's Den, so we're recording this mid-February. They've seen you in Dragon's Den, but you actually recorded that quite a while before. So where are you today?

0:22Jinesh Vohra:Yeah, so we recorded Dragon's Den, so I was in the studios about end of March and then it kind of actually got publicly released just last week, so like the first week of February. So it's been quite a long time. At the time when I recorded it, we had probably about 20 ,000 homeowners, I think I mentioned it in the episode. Since then we've grown quite significantly, so probably in terms of revenues, probably 10x what we were doing at the time. In the last 30 days, we've had about 135 ,000 homeowners use the app. So it's just been incredible. And obviously, the exposure has just told more people about the fact that we exist.

0:58Jinesh Vohra:And obviously, with the cost of living crisis and rates going up, a lot of people are struggling with mortgages. So it's been a really, really good time for us.

1:07Amardeep Parmar:And then how does it work? So people use the app and then they get the cash back and it goes towards paying off their mortgage, right?

1:13Jinesh Vohra:Yeah. So we support 14 of the top lenders in the UK. So the likes of Barclays, Santander, NatWest. We can cover about 85 % of the residential mortgage market. And if you think about the average homeowner, they've got to live. So, you know, they do their weekly grocery shop, they'll do their online shopping, their cup of coffee, their takeaway. So we have access to like two and a half thousand brands. And every time you shop using the Sprive app, you earn cash back. And with one tap, you can essentially send that to your mortgage lender. And the great thing about the app is as you start to use the app and start to do your everyday shopping, you can see oh I'm on track to pay off my mortgage a month earlier than three months than six months and nine months and it can really start to add and we also have like the spare cash feature so where you can like link your current account and then we automatically put money towards your mortgage and it's we do it in a really kind of smart way that adjusts to based on your on your spending and those two features collectively if you do both of them it's super impactful like we have customers I saw a post on social media just a few days ago where a homeowner on track to save£84 ,000 in interest and not 14 years off their mortgage.

2:15Jinesh Vohra:And the difference between being mortgage-free, like 70 versus 60, or 60 versus 50, is just life-changing. So it's super impactful.

2:23Amardeep Parmar:So what's interesting, too, is that the consumer fintech space, right? So people have heard some of the biggest names there. But there was a period where nothing was really happening, right? And then mortgages, as well, is traditionally a very difficult space to be into. So what made you go into this? Why did you decide to tackle this problem?

2:38Jinesh Vohra:Yeah, I mean, it's personally my own experience. So I had a mortgage about 13 years ago. And I remember my wife and I, we bought a house. We were so excited. Obviously, you get the keys. You start doing out the place. But I saw the mortgage offer document. And this was when interest rates were practically zero. And it said for every pound we borrow, we'd pay 50p in interest. And so we were about to pay 150 ,000 pounds in interest over the lifetime of the mortgage. And that just didn't sit right with me. So we went through a journey of trying to pay it off. And very quickly, I realized that, you know, lenders don't build technology to help homeowners pay off their mortgages faster and save interest.

3:11Jinesh Vohra:And so I just felt like there was a huge gap. The mortgage market is very traditional and there were like entrants going in at the time, but they were finding it challenging. And so you can kind of almost learn from the pain points that they experienced and then kind of adjust accordingly. And for me, it was super clear that at a core level, there's only two things that a homeowner really cares about when it comes to their mortgage. They want to pay it off and they want to save as much interest as possible. And so we felt like if we built a consumer platform that's just really focused on that, then that would allow us to really kind of cut through and where the fastest growing consumer mortgage fintech in the UK.

3:45Jinesh Vohra:And you said we there as well, right?

3:47Amardeep Parmar:So with the co-founding team, because a big huge part of this too, right? It's like you're tackling a problem which so many people have. People have a similar idea, but they can't execute it well. What is it about your team that's enabled you to do this?

3:59Jinesh Vohra:Yeah, I mean, both myself and my co-founder were ex-Goldman Sachs. So we know financial services really, really well. I think a lot of it's around relationships and building that network and we've been able to do that. And it's quite complex what we've built. And it's not something that you can just hook into some open APIs and be able to facilitate. And so it adds real kind of defensibility and it's taken time. It wasn't something where one, two years, and we've got to where we've got to. And I left Goldman's in 2019. And obviously, we're now in 2026. So it's taken a long time to get to where we are.

4:39Jinesh Vohra:But that's the part of the reason is because what we've built is very complex.

4:42Amardeep Parmar:And so even Goldman, right? So for some people, it's like, that's the top of the tree, right? Like you've made it, you're working at Goldman, you're high up. So then go and start your own thing. How is that kind of identity shift? Especially, like you said, it's taken a while to get to where you are now. In those years where maybe things weren't, the revenue wasn't coming in, the money wasn't coming in, how did you kind of keep that motivation to keep going when you've kind of given up this very high status role you had before?

5:05Jinesh Vohra:Yeah, I mean, you've got to be slightly crazy. I won't lie. I mean, four years, I didn't earn a salary. And so it's definitely not for the faint hearted. I think for me, the driver was trying to create a legacy. My grandfather had no education, grew up in a rural farm. Then at 30, started his own construction business. and did okay. And then my dad came to the UK literally knowing very little people and having like five pounds in his pocket and starting his own business. And at one point he was like cleaning toilets and working out at the checkout at Asda. And so I've seen how like entrepreneurship can lead to like better outcomes and I've got two young boys.

5:46Jinesh Vohra:And so for me, I wanted to show them that anything's possible. And when you work at organizations like Goldman's, a lot of the client base are high networks. And you see entrepreneurs who've gone and taken big risks and now are clients of Goldman's and helping them, you know, Goldman's generate kind of wealth. And as an employee, your upside is capped. As an entrepreneur, the upside is kind of limitless. And I really believed in myself. Like the 14 years at Goldman's meant that I had a lot of confidence in my ability and I felt like I could do more. And to be honest, I was getting a bit bored.

6:18Jinesh Vohra:And so I just felt like you only live once. I felt like I had a good partner and I spent nine months really kicking the tires on the idea and I really felt that the idea was sound and so I also had paid off my mortgage and that really helped so I went to my wife and I was like look I've got this crazy idea and if I had a mortgage I swear she would have said fuck that you're doing that corporate job but because we were financially a little bit more secure it allowed me to take the risk and look you don't know how long it's going to take so I remember joking my wife and saying don't worry in a year I'm gonna earn a salary so it's not gonna be too much hardship and obviously it took a lot longer um so uh yeah once you in once you're in that ride is it's a bit like a roller coaster you can't really get off so you've got to kind of see it through now but it's going well so I think it was a good decision

7:09Amardeep Parmar:and obviously in those early as well you're not paying yourself a salary the revenue's not coming in you need people to back you as well right you said you believed in yourself how did you get there's early people to back you and believe in you to get this off the ground, especially as you're figuring things out.

7:21Jinesh Vohra:Yeah, because when you're building a fintech, it's not like you can bootstrap it like other businesses, because there's a lot involved, let's put it that way. And so initially when we had the idea, I literally had a PowerPoint, and we raised£240 ,000. And I didn't do this through sophisticated investors, I did it through friends and family. And I didn't go to my friends and family and say, give me money. I've got an idea. I want a business. I just literally told them about what I was doing. So the people I was talking to in terms of like homeowners and then talking to people in the industry and just going through the journey.

8:03Jinesh Vohra:And people were so excited about what I was doing. They were asking me, oh, can I invest? And I remember one of the early investors, and it was through my co-founders network. It was the former CFO of Microsoft US and India. and we had a conversation with him. He goes, I really like the idea. I might invest. So we told everyone that he was going to invest, and so everyone was like, well, if he's going to invest, then I want to invest. And so we created a little bit of FOMO, and then we raised most of the money, and then we went back to Omresh, the former CFO, and he was like, yeah, well, if everyone else has invested, I'll invest.

8:38Jinesh Vohra:And so it all worked out really, really well. And then, obviously, we built the product. We launched, and then on the back of that, we then raised the money, this time angels, we raised about 1.45 million. And again, a lot of different like small checks, you know, 10, 20 ,000 pounds. We had some interesting meetings where I remember meeting one individual and within 10 minutes, he was like, I'll invest a quarter of a million pounds. And so it's all sorts of people, but literally just a lot of angel investors. I have about 85 angel investors on my cap table. And then the last one was institutional.

9:13Jinesh Vohra:And then we were a lot more metrics and things like that. But it's been a really tough, like fundraising has been tough because if you look at the fintech landscape, especially consumer, in the last five years, there hasn't been many winners. And so when you're in a space that hasn't necessarily done well, then it makes investors nervous. On the other hand as well, mortgage tech companies have struggled as well. So I'm in a space that just has a graveyard hard of fintechs that have not managed the VC community's expectations. And so, yeah, it's been an interesting journey, but just perseverance and pure grit and determination has kind of got me through.

9:55Amardeep Parmar:On that VC side in particular then, because you said how the market wasn't necessarily a very attractive market for many VCs. What made them come in? like why do they give you the money despite seeing the track record of the market and seeing the other things because a lot of vcs like talk about how you're going to back the person other people aren't backing because that's where you get the like return right but a lot of people talk about that not necessarily do it so the people that invested in you despite being like okay mortgage market is tough consumer fintech is tough how did they decide that you're the guy and you you're

10:26Jinesh Vohra:co-founder the team to do this yeah so i mean i got a lot of rejections i've never been so rejected in all my life. You've got to have a thick skin. But I found like, if you look at all my investors, institutional as well as kind of the angel investors, they really kind of bought into me and believed that I could, I had the kind of the vision and the strategy to effectively make it happen. And I mean, it's not by coincidence, but by chance, probably about 80 to maybe 90 % of my cap table are like ethnic minority investors. so I think that might be something to do with it where they kind of feel a bit more of a connection and yeah it's just that obviously I've been able to kind of like prove them right which is nice.

11:12Amardeep Parmar:And then like looking forward now as well right so obviously you've got to where you are today and now you've had like this huge surge of users from the last year what are you looking to like where's the plan where you're going to head to?

11:23Jinesh Vohra:Yeah I mean ultimately we're still really early in our journey so I think we're tracking around 8 million revenue and if you think about the space that I'm in, so mortgages, it's a trillion pound market. Most lenders, when they go into lending, they're making up to 3 % net income margin on a mortgage loan. So if you sell just 10 ,000 mortgages, you make 60 to 70 million pounds in income. And so the macro environment is that there's 11 million homeowners with a mortgage. Most of them, like 3 million will have a mortgage past the age of 68. So imagine being in your kind of late 60s or 70s and still having a mortgage.

11:58Jinesh Vohra:Rates are obviously high, cost of living crisis, there's the world of AI and all people have jobs over the next 20 years in robotics and things like that. So I think it's just a really timely proposition in terms of what we're building. For us it's to really grab market share. My vision is to get millions of people using our app to manage their household finances. If you take a step back and think about what Supply does, we help people manage their mortgage, which is ultimately their largest household commitment. We help them with their shopping, which most people spend what you earn. And then we also have a savings feature.

12:35Jinesh Vohra:And so that is pretty much everyone's, you know, everyone's most of their life when it comes to finances. And so a huge, huge amount of opportunity for us to really kind of help the customer. But in that focus of helping them become debt-free faster. And look, if mortgages go well, then we'll expand to other verticals, other other geographies and so yeah it's just about taking taking each day as it comes but there's there's a lot of potential and we're just getting started hello hello i hope you're enjoying

13:07Amardeep Parmar:the show so far i'm amadeep palmer co-founder of bay hq and the host of this show for those of you don't know bay hq is the community for high growth asian heritage founders and investors in the uk Over 7 ,500 people have attended our events. 200 people have been for our Impact programmes. And obviously, there's been over 250 episodes of this podcast. If you want to join us and take part in the programmes and come to the events, go to bayhq.com forward slash join. We also just released our first ever book called Startups for Outsiders, which you can get on Amazon now. And the link is in the bio.

13:46Amardeep Parmar:Hope to see you soon at our event. Hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. And I think when you came in as well, I think one of the questions I asked you was like, have you coped with a surge in demand off like Dragon's Den, right? Because I think a lot of people aren't prepared for that. But then you're saying how you built the team, that you've got that team in place, which can handle way more volume than you're already doing. And you've got the team in India, right? So how did that come about? How do you think about how you're going to structure the team and where you're going to hire from as well?

14:13Jinesh Vohra:So I kind of leveraged my experience at Goldman's. So at Goldman's, I manage globally a third of the organization from an operational risk standpoint. And a big chunk of my team was in India. The talent you have is amazing. And Goldman's very early on had like a Goldman Sachs office there. And I spent a lot of time in Bangalore. And so I knew the quality of the talent that is there. And my co-founder, his great grandfather actually was the king of Hydropad. So in the 1940s, he was the richest man in the world. And so there was a whole story around how a lot of their wealth was seized, which I won't go into.

14:52Jinesh Vohra:But he has a lot of good connections out in Bangalore. So he relocated from London to Bangalore once we started the company. And so we have a lot of headcount there. But on the ground, it's not something that's outsourced. And we've got some amazing talent. And, yeah, a lot of investors were like, are you going to be able to handle the volume? Because obviously three to four million people can watch the Dragon's Den episode. And a lot of the kind of target market will be people who have mortgages. And so, you know, we knew that it could be pretty crazy. And, you know, we built the app so that we could handle like a million people quite comfortably.

15:32Jinesh Vohra:And so, you know, we're not there yet. So it was completely, completely fine. And yeah, we were the UK's number one most downloaded finance app above the likes of like Monzo and Revolut last week. So it's been good.

15:48Amardeep Parmar:And it's interesting as well, because one of the things that you were challenged on with Dragon's Den was about how to get new users, right? And you were saying about how you're not focusing on that at that time. Obviously, since then, you've grown so much. How is it you're now reaching people? What strategies have you found working for you?

16:04Jinesh Vohra:yeah so i think the comment there was very much and i'm a firm believer of like unit economics and growing sustainably so initially we were very much trying to get product market fit and making sure that every customer made us money because it's really nice and there was there was a heyday where a lot of founders um i don't think it's ever a good idea it doesn't matter what the macro environment is where they were pushed to grow at all costs and so you're just burning cash and that's not good business and so you know we really focused on like make sure every customer makes us money and then you want to then accelerate and we're in that position which is which is fantastic and then in terms of like over half percent like half of our kind of customer base comes from word of mouth and referrals and that's a really good sign when people just love what you do and they tell their friends and family that hey you have a mortgage you should really be using sprive and so yeah more of our half of our kind of customers come from from from that spectrum then 25 will come from like social media and influencers so people who actually we only work with influencers and people on social media that actually use the app for real because it just comes across really authentic so they're using the app to save money on their mortgage and they're talking about how it's saving them money and then this you know when the supermarket or like you know they're buying a cup of coffee or takeaway or they're just in there in they're showing that in their life how sprivers just completely fit in and people can see it and they can see it's genuine and then you know they start to like download the app and then they become advocates and that's been super, super helpful.

17:30Jinesh Vohra:And then the organic content that works well, we boost it through paid ads. So that just helps us get that authentic content and just get it in front of more eyes. And then obviously things like TV, we're doing like TV ads. So we've got like one of our investors is Channel 4 Ventures. And so that creates more brand awareness, which is nice because that's the hardest challenge is how do you cut through? Like the biggest difficulty for a brand like mine is people knowing you exist. Once people know you exist, it's a little bit easy to kind of convince people to start using the app. And so, yeah, and we're doing some really cool stuff.

18:04Jinesh Vohra:So, like, existing customers, every week, someone can win£1 ,000 towards their mortgage. Every new customer every week, at least for now, they have a chance to get their next monthly mortgage payment paid on Sprive. And all this stuff creates buzz because people, who wouldn't want to, you know, save money on their mortgage and also have the chance. and it's much better odds than winning the lottery. And so all of that stuff is really doing well for us.

18:30Amardeep Parmar:I imagine so much in your area too, it's about trust, is that because the mortgage, like you said, is such a big part of people's finances, if it's a new app, they're probably a bit more worried about, like, okay, I don't want to connect it to my mortgage because what if this happens, whatever that happens. But do you find, like, especially with the TV ads and stuff like that, and also as more people are using it, it just kind of has that tipping point where, okay, let's say I'm thinking about using the app, but I don't know they're like oh wait an influencer I know is using it oh I've just seen a TV ad about it oh it's just from Dragon's Den and is it kind of building up those different bricks and that thing and then are you seeing that kind of exponential in some ways 100 % I think you're