Crowwd Combats Financial Misinformation with Merit-Based Social Platform for Verified Investment Insights
India's retail investment boom has a dark underbelly: an epidemic of financial misinformation spreading through social media platforms, Telegram groups, and WhatsApp channels. With 10 crore retail accounts and 5 lakh new accounts opening weekly, unsuspecting investors are falling prey to unqualified "finfluencers" peddling dubious investment advice.
Enter Ajitesh Gupta, the 25-year-old co-founder and CEO of Crowwd, who's building what he calls "the anti-finfluencer platform" – a merit-based social media platform that democratizes financial discussions while filtering out noise and misinformation. Rather than amplifying the loudest voices, Crowwd surfaces the most credible ones, creating a space where investment advice comes exclusively from SEBI-registered analysts and verified experts.
This isn't just another fintech story – it's about fundamentally restructuring how Indians consume financial content in an era where bad advice can destroy life savings.
The Crisis of Trust in Financial Content
"The supply chain of investment starts with information gathering about the investment, goes on to making the investment and then leads to the optimization of your portfolio," Gupta explains, breaking down the investment journey into its core components. The problem? The very first step – information gathering – has been corrupted by an ecosystem that rewards sensationalism over substance.
The statistics paint a grim picture. Despite having sophisticated financial institutions and trading platforms, retail investors consistently underperform. Hedge funds with decades of experience barely manage 15-18% annual returns, yet India's developing market has created unrealistic expectations of 100% annual returns among new investors.
This expectation gap creates fertile ground for financial misinformation. Unqualified influencers promise unrealistic returns through Telegram channels and YouTube videos, preying on investors who lack the knowledge to distinguish between legitimate analysis and marketing disguised as advice.
The Regulatory Reality
Current regulations are clear: investment advice can only be provided by SEBI-registered analysts. Yet enforcement remains challenging in the fast-moving world of social media, where influencers can build massive followings before regulators catch up. Crowwd's solution? Build compliance into the platform's DNA rather than trying to police it after the fact.
— Ajitesh Gupta, CEO of Crowwd
Crowwd's Technology: The Intelligence Behind the Platform
At the heart of Crowwd's approach lies a sophisticated AI model trained over two and a half years with 80 parameters that evaluate content quality. This isn't just keyword matching or basic sentiment analysis – it's a comprehensive framework that examines multiple dimensions of financial content.
The 80-Parameter Quality Framework
The platform evaluates several critical factors when ranking content:
Step 1: Analyze fact-to-opinion ratio (optimal: 30% facts, 70% informed analysis)
Step 2: Verify data freshness and factual accuracy against trusted sources
Step 3: Evaluate writing quality, grammar, and structure
Step 4: Weight engagement based on validator expertise (expert validation counts more)
Step 5: Generate quality score out of 12 using all 80 parameters
Step 6: Surface highest-scoring content for maximum visibility
This multi-layered approach generates a score out of 12, with the highest-scoring content receiving maximum visibility – effectively creating a meritocracy where quality rises to the top regardless of the creator's follower count.
Fighting Fake News with Technology
Fake news presents a particular challenge because it often generates high engagement through sensational claims. Crowwd addresses this through multiple verification layers:
Reference Benchmarking: Content is cross-referenced against established financial sources like Reuters and Moneycontrol to verify factual claims.
Correlation Analysis: The platform examines how well article claims align with broader market reality, flagging content with negative correlation scores.
Human Verification: When AI flags potential misinformation, human analysts review the content within 30 minutes, aiming to reduce this to 10 minutes through further AI optimization.
From Europe to India: A Strategic Pivot
Crowwd's journey from European startup to Indian fintech reflects both opportunity and challenge. Originally founded in Europe with backing from the HEXA incubator and 19 investors across India and Europe, the company made a strategic decision to relocate operations to India when they discovered 70% of their web traffic originated from Indian users despite having only 25% of users based in India.
This dramatic usage pattern signaled massive unmet demand in the Indian market, prompting a complex corporate restructuring that involved navigating RBI regulations, foreign contribution rules, and multi-million dollar share transfers across jurisdictions.
"Being a 24-year-old guy, being very frank, if I speak from a personal capacity I didn't know how I would maneuver through those challenges," Gupta admits. "But eventually if you're trying to build something which is right for the audience, the motivation is high and good things do find their way to completion."
The pivot proved successful. Within three months of rebuilding their platform specifically for Indian users on both iOS and Android, Crowwd achieved impressive metrics: 500 new daily users, 50% monthly active users, and 10% daily active users – remarkable numbers for a platform transitioning between markets.
Community-Driven Growth and Monetization
Unlike traditional social media platforms that monetize through user data or subscription fees, Crowwd has adopted an unusual approach: keeping information access completely free while generating revenue through brand partnerships and events.
"Information accessibility should not be paid in our opinion," Gupta explains. "People should get the best information at free of cost."
This philosophy reflects both idealistic vision and practical reality. Their core demographic – primarily 18 to 28-year-olds – has limited disposable income, and a new platform needs to build trust before asking for payment. Current revenue streams include sponsorships for their monthly "Arthawaad" events (with partners like HDFC) and in-app brand placements that don't compromise the user experience.
Building a Young, Passionate Team
Perhaps most remarkably, Crowwd has scaled from two people in January 2024 to over 70 team members by year-end, with an average age of just 21-22. Gupta, at 25, is among the oldest team members alongside one 30-year-old colleague.
"The heart of the company is never the product, it's always the team," Gupta reflects. "When these young fellows believe in what we are building, that is the most powerful feeling you can ever have."
This young team's belief in the mission appears to be paying dividends, with users regularly onboarding and engaging with the platform's curated financial content.
The Broader Vision: Building a Complete Investment Ecosystem
While Crowwd currently focuses on the information-gathering phase of investing, Gupta envisions expanding into a comprehensive investment ecosystem covering all three stages of the investment journey.
Stage 1: Information Gathering (Current Focus)
Providing reliable, credible, and trustworthy information from verified sources.
Stage 2: Investment Execution (Future Phase)
Integrating brokerage services so users can execute trades without leaving the platform, though Gupta emphasizes this would complement rather than compete with existing platforms like Zerodha and Groww.
Stage 3: Portfolio Optimization (Long-term Vision)
AI-powered portfolio analysis and optimization recommendations, helping users make informed decisions about diversification, averaging, and position management.
"This whole ecosystem is something which I envision with Crowwd in the next 5 years," Gupta outlines, painting a picture of comprehensive financial guidance from research to execution to optimization.
Key Takeaways for Financial Technology Entrepreneurs
The Crowwd story offers several crucial insights for entrepreneurs building in the financial technology space:
1. Compliance as Competitive Advantage
The Strategy: Build regulatory compliance into your platform's core architecture rather than treating it as an afterthought.
The Reality: In highly regulated industries like finance, compliance can become a moat that protects against less scrupulous competitors.
Your Action: Partner with legal experts early and make compliance a product feature, not a business constraint.
2. Quality Over Quantity in Content Curation
The Strategy: Use sophisticated algorithms to surface high-quality content rather than just popular content.
The Reality: Users seeking financial information prefer credible sources over viral content when their money is at stake.
Your Action: Invest in content quality metrics and verification systems that reward expertise over engagement.
3. Geographic Pivot Based on User Behavior
The Strategy: Follow your users rather than sticking to original market assumptions.
The Reality: Product-market fit might exist in unexpected geographies, requiring strategic pivots to capture opportunity.
Your Action: Monitor user geographic distribution and be willing to relocate operations to serve your most engaged markets.
4. Free Access Builds Trust in Financial Services
The Strategy: Keep information access free while monetizing through partnerships and events.
The Reality: Users need to trust your platform before they'll pay for premium features, especially in finance.
Your Action: Build trust through free value before introducing paid tiers, and ensure monetization doesn't compromise user experience.
5. Young Teams Can Drive Innovation in Traditional Industries
The Strategy: Hire passionate young professionals who bring fresh perspectives to established industries.
The Reality: Young teams often understand emerging user behaviors better than industry veterans.
Your Action: Balance experience with fresh thinking, and create environments where young talent can contribute meaningfully to strategic decisions.
The broader implications extend beyond fintech into information integrity and democratization of expertise. By creating systems that reward credible voices over loud ones, Crowwd represents a potential model for combating misinformation across various domains.
For entrepreneurs, the Crowwd model demonstrates how purpose-driven companies can tackle systemic problems while building sustainable businesses. As Gupta notes, when team members genuinely believe in the mission, that conviction becomes a powerful force for growth and innovation.
The transformation of financial content from noise to signal isn't just about technology – it's about creating economic incentives that reward quality over quantity, expertise over influence, and truth over sensationalism. In a country where investment decisions affect millions of families' financial futures, platforms like Crowwd represent hope for a more informed and protected retail investor ecosystem.
About the Guest
Ajitesh Gupta serves as co-founder and CEO of Crowwd, where he leads the mission to democratize financial discussions and combat investment misinformation. Born and raised in Delhi in a family of bureaucrats, his entrepreneurial journey began at 17 with a smart band for toddlers to prevent choking incidents.
His path to fintech entrepreneurship included studying computer engineering at the University of Edinburgh followed by an MSc in Management with finance specialization at Imperial College London. During his studies, he built and sold a real-time news platform for asset trading at age 20, using the proceeds to learn firsthand about market volatility and the importance of reliable information.
Gupta's diverse professional experience spans multiple sectors: quantitative product analysis at Baron Beverages, investment banking at Deutsche Bank, strategy consulting at Bentley Systems, financial analysis at Innovate, and derivatives market analysis at Vector Capital. Beyond business, he holds a black belt in Taekwondo, represented Delhi state in air pistol shooting, and maintains a daily cooking practice.
Crowwd is a merit-based social media platform for investors and traders that focuses on surfacing credible financial content from SEBI-registered analysts and verified experts. The platform uses AI-driven quality scoring across 80 parameters to combat financial misinformation while building a community where investment advice quality determines visibility rather than follower counts.