Bengaluru : Rovia, a global wealth platform helping equity-rich professionals transfer, manage, and grow their wealth across borders, has raised $1M in pre-seed funding from Antler India, along with co-investors CDM Capital, AC Ventures, Operators Studio and angels across US and India. The company is building financial infrastructure for millions of international tech employees, particularly professionals at U.S.-listed technology companies, whose wealth is increasingly tied to equity compensation but who face significant friction in accessing and diversifying it.
Rovia was co-founded in 2025 by Shivang Badaya (Co-Founder and CEO) and Arnav Grover (Co-Founder and CPO). Shivang previously served as a strategy and growth leader at Zolve, one of the fastest-growing cross-border neobanks globally, where he helped scale the company to over $25M ARR and managed a credit card portfolio exceeding $200M in annualized receivables across the U.S. market. Before Zolve, he worked as an investor at multiple hedge funds covering global financial services, technology, and consumer businesses across the U.S., India, and Southeast Asia. He holds a degree from IIT Bombay and is a CFA charterholder. Arnav brings deep product and fintech infrastructure experience from Vance and Zolve, where he worked on cross-border financial products serving international professionals. He holds an MBA from IIM Calcutta and a B.Tech from IIT Bombay. Together, the two founders bring a rare combination of cross-border banking, investing, product, and compliance expertise to one of the most structurally underserved markets in global wealth management.
“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. However, international employees are at a structural disadvantage and lose significant value when trying to manage or diversify, because of friction in various forms. We have watched Shivang and Arnav closely, as they iterated organically via the Antler Residency, and arrived at this massive opportunity. Their prior experience gives them both a rich understanding of this customer, and an understanding of how to scale product infrastructure for a cross-border financial play”, said Nitin Sharma, Partner at Antler India.
There is nearly $1.5 trillion in employer stock held by employees globally, and a large and growing share of that wealth sits with Indian professionals at U.S. technology companies. These employees routinely lose 6-7% of value on every liquidation event due to cross-border friction: high FX and remittance costs, tax complexity across jurisdictions, limited access to U.S. brokerage infrastructure, delayed settlements, and concentrated exposure to a single employer. Rovia’s platform addresses these pain points through a unified interface that enables users to transfer, diversify, and reinvest their equity compensation with significantly reduced friction. The company has already secured registration as an SEC-registered investment adviser in the United States.
“I spent years watching this problem up close, first as an investor studying wealth infrastructure globally, then inside Zolve where I saw how much value international employees were leaking every time they tried to access their own money,” said Shivang Badaya, Co-Founder and CEO of Rovia. “The RSU is the entry point, but the bigger opportunity is becoming the full wealth operating system for equity-rich professionals globally. That is what Arnav and I are building.”
Since launching its beta, Rovia has been growing assets under management at 100% month-on-month, and is currently tracking over $60M in RSUs and equity compensation assets across its user base, sourced from employees at more than 300 companies. The company’s funding will be used to expand its engineering and product team, deepen brokerage and financial infrastructure integrations, and accelerate regulatory and compliance capabilities as it scales across global tech employee communities.
The long-term ambition is to build the most trusted global wealth operating system for professionals whose financial lives are shaped by equity compensation.