Rovia raises $1 million pre-seed to help tech workers unlock equity wealth

BENGALURU: There is a growing pile of wealth sitting on company balance sheets and employee stock plans, and fintech startup Rovia wants to help professionals cash in without getting caught in the cross-border maze.

The Bengaluru-founded wealth platform has raised $1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Antler India, with participation from CDM Capital, AC Ventures, Operators Studio and a group of angel investors from India and the United States. The company is targeting a problem it believes has been largely overlooked: helping globally mobile professionals access, manage and diversify wealth tied up in equity compensation.

Founded in 2025 by Shivang Badaya and Arnav Grover, the startup is building infrastructure for employees whose compensation increasingly comes in the form of stock grants and restricted stock units (RSUs), particularly those working for US-listed technology firms.

Badaya brings experience from Zolve, where he worked in strategy and growth and helped scale the cross-border banking platform to more than $25 million in annual recurring revenue. Prior to that, he worked as an investor covering financial services, technology and consumer sectors across multiple markets. Grover previously worked at Vance and Zolve, focusing on cross-border financial products and infrastructure.

According to the company, nearly $1.5 trillion in employer stock is currently held by employees worldwide, with a significant portion belonging to Indian professionals working for American technology companies. Yet converting that wealth into usable capital often comes at a cost.

Employees can lose between 6 and 7 per cent of value during liquidation events because of foreign exchange charges, remittance fees, tax complexities, delayed settlements and limited access to overseas brokerage services. Many also remain heavily exposed to the fortunes of a single employer.

Rovia’s platform aims to simplify that process through a single interface that allows users to transfer, diversify and reinvest stock-based wealth more efficiently. The company has also secured registration as an SEC-registered investment adviser in the United States, a milestone that could help it expand its reach among global professionals.

“The $1.5 trillion sitting in equity compensation globally is one of the most under-managed pools of individual wealth, only growing further with the AI boom,” said Antler India partner Nitin Sharma. “International employees are at a structural disadvantage when trying to manage or diversify that wealth. Shivang and Arnav have developed a strong understanding of both the customer problem and the infrastructure needed to solve it.”

For Rovia co-founder and CEO Shivang Badaya, the opportunity extends far beyond helping employees sell shares. “I spent years watching this problem up close, first as an investor and later inside Zolve, where I saw how much value international employees were losing every time they tried to access their own money,” said Badaya. “The RSU is the entry point, but the larger ambition is to build a complete wealth operating system for equity-rich professionals around the world.”

The startup says it has already gained early traction. Since launching its beta product, Rovia claims assets under management have been growing at 100 per cent month-on-month. It is currently tracking more than $60 million in equity compensation assets from employees across more than 300 companies.

The fresh capital will be used to expand the engineering and product teams, deepen brokerage and financial infrastructure integrations, and strengthen regulatory and compliance capabilities as the business scales.

As stock-based compensation becomes an increasingly common route to wealth creation, Rovia is betting that the next big fintech opportunity lies not in earning equity, but in helping people make better use of it once they have it.