Meet the minds behind Brú Finance, a decentralised finance lending platform for real-world assets who are on the mission to create a bank-less finance option for owners of real-world assets across the globe.
The Founding Team of every startup is its cornerstone. From setting up operations, clarifying the strategy, laying down the first principles and raising investments, starting-up is an onerous task with great responsibilities for Founders. It’s the founding team that sets the vision, mission and culture of their startup as Kickstarter and put a startup on the path of zero to one. At Brú Finance, the founding team carries with it decades of experience and domain knowledge of finance, information technology and Blockchain, the verticals a DeFi protocol intersects with. This capable founding team is made of:-
With more than 18 years of experience in various verticals of finance as a debt syndication professional, CFO-on-Demand and Risk Management Consultant, Ashish has done it all. A serial entrepreneur, he co-founded PhynEdge, FirstCFO, CreditMart & Blockchain Advisory Council before starting the inter-twined entities of Whrrl & Brú Finance.
An IT maverick having more than two decades of experience in the technology sector, working with giants like Capgemini, iGate, 3i Infotech et al., Falguni has been at the forefront of the technology innovation curve. Starting her journey from Microsoft technologies, moving to data warehousing, analytics and finally to Blockchain; Falguni, A people’s manager has vast experience handling multi-million dollar projects and large teams of 100+ members.
As a founder, I am a big believer of Gandhi Ji’s Jantar (Talisman) “Are my steps going to be valuable and useful to the poorest and the weakest?” and my life’s work has been guided by that principle. That’s why after getting my degree as a Chartered Accountant, I spent 15 years helping small businesses with adoption of complex financial tools & products.
The same principles were at fore when we started building blockchain lending for small and marginal farmers of India by marrying the oldest lending product of humankind — warehouse receipt finance (commodity finance) with the cutting edge Web3 technologies. Having implemented such a solution first-hand at the bottom of pyramid, I can speak from experience that we need a financial system that is open, global and is free from border & financial controls. A financial system that offers capital to the needy wherever they are and those who have wealth should be able to help the seekers of financial capital irrespective of their residential geography.
Lending against Real World Asset NFTs brings the safety and reliability of asset backed loans, high yield and ease of transactions to the lenders while connecting millions of unbanked people and small businesses to the cryptoverse.
Integrity, Team Spirit and Meritocracy are the key values that we have built Brú.Finance edifice upon. These are the set of values that have helped us to create a close-knit family of people at Brú Finance who buidl the organisation through the thickest and the thinnest of the times, through the gyration of bear and bull markets.
For us at Brú, integrity goes to the core of the value system as it allows all of us to be honest with each other as well as towards the organisational goals and culture. This integrity among members is what brings the team spirit to the fore of the organisation.The entire startup works as a cohesive unit with pursuit of a single objective. Last not but the least, our emphasis on meritocracy and its clear communication to everyone in the team has made the team members self-motivated and self-starters with a bias towards action. And finally, all this will be too robotic if there is no fun involved and the importance of having fun while creating a startup can’t ever be be overemphasised.
I am a very strong follower of Jack Ma’s golden advice” As an entrepreneur, one has to find the people who are smarter than the founder; and then to make sure that these smart people can work together.”
This is where the role of founders becomes very profound as creating a cohesive team requires buy-in of the mission and the vision of the startup by everyone, from the top to bottom. A well rounded startup culture that promotes meritocracy, rewards behaviour that helps the organization move the needle at extraordinary pace, and recognises that team members first and foremost are human beings and not cogs in a wheel is what helps create best of the teams. A team that can deliver, compete and excel at the highest level.
Setting up Brú Finance has been a very intense learning experience for me personally. We started Blockchain platform as a service in a country like India when the word blockchain itself was derided upon. Against all odds we made it a success and even those people who predicted that the industry does not require our solution are now making acquisition offers to us.
While personal learning has been that technology is just an enabler to create value for the customers, one more important learning has been that building startups is a marathon. Changing customer behaviour is a long haul, more so for a new technology. The entrepreneurs should be willing to grit their teeth and buidl irrespective of the external environment. But like every good marathoner, the entrepreneurs must know when is the right time to preserve and when is the time to change gears and press the pedal hard.
Our first and foremost goal is to launch Brú Finance on the Mainnet and bring the benefits of crypto lending to farmers of India. By First quarter of 2022, Whrrl will be truly global as we are already forging partnerships in Asian & Latin American markets for offering crypto lending against commodity finance to farmers and small businesses.
While agriculture financing and financial inclusion of farmers is the first port of call for Brú, our solution will be expanded for financial inclusion of not only farmers, but small businesses as well as other unbanked/underbanked individuals across global south using a plethora of asset classes such as farm produces, non-agri commodities like metals and minerals, gold, receivables, mortgages within next year.
To connect with Ashish, Falguni and Abhishek, you can connect with them on their LinkedIn Profiles or follow them on Twitter: