Viram Shah wants your money to see the world

Six or seven strangers sent Viram Shah money before Vested looked much like the investment platform it would become. He and his colleagues had run advertisements for a US stock investing service. Behind the advertisements sat a spreadsheet and a manually delivered service. The people responding did not know the founders. They wanted what the founders were offering. For a business devoted to moving money across borders, those first transfers were a rather persuasive introduction.

Shah recounted that experiment years later, with the lesson still attached: establish whether somebody wants the thing before spending a fortune constructing it. It is an agreeable principle, particularly when the thing involves financial infrastructure. A spreadsheet has many shortcomings, but an extravagant taste in venture capital is seldom among them.

Today, Shah is the Mumbai-based co-founder and CEO of Vested Finance. His work joins capital markets, software and the inconvenient fact that a person can buy a global company's products far more easily than acquire its shares. The question has occupied him since business school. Why should an investor's opportunities stop at a border their everyday purchases crossed long ago?

A Berkeley conversation with three home countries

His route into finance began with engineering. Shah studied electronics and telecommunications at the University of Mumbai from 2010 to 2014, then joined J.P. Morgan as an investment banking analyst. His banking experience included Mumbai and Hong Kong. He came from a business family and wanted to bring technology and finance together; the two subjects were already sharing space in his career before they shared a company.

He arrived at Berkeley's Haas School of Business in 2017 and completed his MBA in 2019. Along the way, he worked on market research at MindsDB, business development at Enview and projects connected with the university's startup ecosystem. These were opportunities to examine young businesses from the inside, after working at an institution with a rather longer history.

At Berkeley, a conversation with fellow students Darwin Arifin and Eric Huynh exposed a shared frustration. Their backgrounds connected them to Indonesia, Hong Kong and India. Their investments back home were concentrated locally. They could see an international investing experience in America that felt awkward to reproduce in their home markets. Different countries had produced the same question.

Shah and his co-founders began working on Vested in 2018, while he was still at Berkeley. The business launched in 2019. By February 2020, he was discussing its web and mobile service, alongside co-founders Arifin, Huynh and Yinghan Lin. The classroom problem had acquired customers.

The distance between liking a brand and owning it

The original proposition had an everyday quality. Indians used international brands, yet participating in those businesses as investors involved unfamiliar processes and costs. Shah framed the gap through names people already recognised: Nike, Starbucks, Amazon. A customer relationship could travel beautifully. Ownership required rather more arrangements.

He approached the experience as a sequence of practical obstacles. An investor needed understandable information, an account, a way to move money, an investment choice and help with the paperwork afterwards. Vested combined access to US stocks and exchange-traded funds with fractional investing and pre-built portfolios called Vests. Each addressed a different point at which an interested person might stop.

In 2020, Shah identified fund transfers as a particularly stubborn bottleneck. The stock purchase was only one part of the journey. In October 2021, a partnership with SBM Bank India introduced Vested Direct, designed to simplify deposits, reduce transfer charges and improve the time it took money to arrive. The less glamorous plumbing was getting its own product work.

That emphasis helps explain the founder's job. Access involves much more than displaying a familiar ticker symbol on a screen. The appealing interface sits above banking relationships and operational details. Shah was building around those details while explaining why an Indian investor might want international exposure in the first place.

Seventy-five pitches, and one message worth answering

In April 2022, Vested announced a $12 million Series A led by Ayon Capital. The tidy announcement concealed six months of fundraising. Shah described contacting more than 85 investors and taking 75 pitch meetings, all virtually. Three investors rejected the company at the final stage. The calendar, as founders discover, has little respect for a funding headline.

The lead investor connection began with an incoming LinkedIn message from Rahul Pagidipati's team. Afterwards, Shah joked about what might have happened had they left it unanswered. It is a pleasingly ordinary hinge for a consequential transaction: amid the carefully prepared presentations, someone still had to read the inbox.

The raise relied on a 26-page memo, a pitch deck and a financial model. Eric Chen of Ovo Fund continued backing the business. Creators including Akshat Shrivastava, Sharan Hegde and Dhruv Rathee also participated. Their involvement fitted an ongoing concern of Shah's: prospective customers needed to understand global investing before an account-opening process could be much use to them.

A company that writes things down

Vested's early team was divided between the United States and India. Remote work became a deliberate choice from the beginning. Shah has explained that he wanted flexibility for colleagues and to avoid concentrating influence in a single office. A cross-border company was also having to decide how its own people would cross the distance.

His answer depends heavily on writing. Meetings and discussions become documents, shared through Slack. The company built an internal search tool spanning its documents and channels. Leadership meets quarterly; teams and the wider company gather in person during the year. Managers can organise additional meetings when a problem benefits from working together.

He also acknowledges the awkward part: bringing new colleagues into a culture they cannot simply observe from the next desk. His description includes managers learning to give people room and employees taking responsibility for their work. The arrangement needs maintenance as the team grows. An office lease can be signed once. A working culture is rather less obliging.

When a beautiful assignment stopped being enough

In July 2026, Shah described a hiring encounter that changed Vested's interview process. A candidate submitted an unusually polished take-home assignment, then struggled to explain the decisions in a live discussion. The company had treated assignments as evidence of effort and reasoning. AI made that evidence harder to read.

Vested moved towards live working sessions, whiteboard discussions and exercises where candidates could use AI openly. Shah wanted to see judgement in motion: what someone asked, challenged and discarded. His formulation was succinct: “watch people think, don't grade what they submit.”

The episode belongs beside that first spreadsheet. In both cases, an attractive presentation was insufficient. Customers had to demonstrate demand; candidates had to demonstrate understanding. The resemblance is an editorial one, but it makes the two episodes worth considering together. Shah's public accounts repeatedly return to finding evidence that survives a closer look.

“watch people think, don't grade what they submit.”

Viram Shah, on changing Vested's hiring process

The pleasure of getting out of the red

Looking back on 2025, Shah announced that Vested had become profitable after six years. He described the freedom this gave the business to execute. Fundraising provides its own public occasions; a company paying its way offers a quieter kind of satisfaction. His reluctance to return to losses was plain.

That year also brought private-market offerings, global funds and the Global Investor Group, including gatherings where customers could meet. His July 2026 speaker biography recorded more than $1 billion in assets under administration and over $6 billion in processed trading volume. These describe the platform's activity and customer assets, rather than Shah's personal wealth.

In his September anniversary update, Shah reported cumulative trading volume of $7 billion and customers across more than 60 countries. He also reported approvals for two GIFT City licences. The progression matters to his story: the founder who began by testing interest now spends his time expanding the infrastructure around it. His ambition remains to solve cross-border investing problems for Indians wherever they live.

Viram, with no extra consonant

For all the institutional vocabulary, Shah's company biography has room for a small domestic comedy of identity. People keep calling him Vikram. One correspondent even tried to persuade him that Viram was a typo. The entrepreneur may have more success persuading people to reconsider their portfolios than to reconsider an unnecessary letter.

He also volunteers a belief in rebirth and parallel universes, alongside the declaration that his life now runs on objectives and key results. “My entire life is now driven by OKRs,” he writes. The combination gives the biography some welcome texture: metaphysical possibilities on one side, quarterly measurement on the other.

Across the documented episodes, a particular career takes shape. Engineering led to banking, banking to Berkeley, and Berkeley to a shared inconvenience that people would pay to remove. Shah keeps returning to that original distance between wanting access and getting it. There are more products now, more infrastructure and considerably more money passing through. The question that started the work is still recognisable.