Ex-PayU Finance CEO's startup Zinc grabs $25.5M from Nexus, others
Zinc aims to support Indian parents and students in planning for international education by offering counselling solutions and financial products to build a dollar-denominated corpus for tuition.
Zinc, an edu-wealth startup, has raised $25.5 million in seed funding led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Quona Capital, EDBI, Global Ventures, and Saison Capital.
Zinc aims to support Indian parents and students in planning for international education by offering financial and counselling solutions. It advises on the best educational institutions abroad and provides financial products to build a dollar-denominated corpus for tuition.
The company plans to use the latest funding round to expand its core offerings and scale its operations. Founder and CEO Prashanth Ranganathan told YourStory that the primary focus of the startup will be on "building solutions that help both parents and students reach their educational and financial goals."
He emphasised that the mission is “to make sure that not only do the children get to the right university outcome, but also the parents don't fall into a debt trap,” which is often a consequence of late planning.
The funding will support four main initiatives: enhancing AI-driven counselling, expanding wealth management offerings, building a lending arm, and facilitating remittance for education-specific purposes. Prashanth elaborated, “The first part is counselling the second is financial tools and planning.”
He added that Zinc also plans to “bring leverage into the mix” for lending as it is looking to “use some of our equity and bring in some debt” to execute its strategy.
Its latest solution, Zinc Honors, combines financial planning with Ada, an AI-powered counselling tool, to guide students toward university choices while helping parents build a stable investment portfolio in dollars.
Zinc’s services include student counselling for university selection, financial planning for parents, and an automated fund that adapts to market conditions. It partners with wealth management firms and eventually plans to offer lending services to support families in funding overseas education goals.
Zinc’s wealth management approach is tailored for parents planning to fund their child’s overseas education. Instead of recommending traditional Indian investment avenues like mutual funds, Zinc offers a dollar-denominated investment corpus, allowing families to save directly in the currency of their child's education expenses.
To support this, Zinc has received key licenses: a Registered Investment Advisor license from SEBI for personalised investment advice and in-principle approval for a payment service provider license. Zinc has also applied for a brokerage license in GIFT City, furthering its cross-border financial services vision.
The company has also partnered with Leo Wealth from Singapore to create a customised fund designed to manage the financial lifecycle of educational expenses.
The fund adjusts its allocations automatically over time, initially focusing on growth assets like equities and gradually shifting towards safer assets such as debt and treasury bonds as the child approaches college age. This reduces exposure to market volatility closer to the withdrawal period.
Zinc’s strategy is to manage risks in a manner similar to high-net-worth investment products, offering risk-adjusted returns that align with tuition timelines. This customised approach helps mitigate currency fluctuation risks and market downturns, which are critical considerations for parents aiming to meet international tuition costs predictably.
Ranganathan had previously founded Truvie Security, which was sold to PayPal in 2011, and co-founded SayNow Inc, acquired by Google in 2010. He also co-founded PaySense in 2015, later sold to PayU, after which he joined the company as the CEO of PayU Finance.
Edited by Kanishk Singh