Piggy

» see piggy.co.in as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

piggy was one of those product companies i only ever encountered as a name on a yc batch list. mutual funds in turkey are a small category next to individual stocks and gold, and the local aggregator apps do not resemble the indian direct-plan aggregator category piggy was built inside. from ankara i did not have a reason to try it and did not have a way to fund it. by the time it shut down in june 2025 i knew about it purely because the ralph queue pulled it in.

inside india piggy was a smaller entrant in a category dominated by zerodha coin and groww, with paytm money arriving a bit later. the pitch was simple. piggy would only route to direct-plan mutual funds, cutting out the traditional agent commission of 1 to 1.25 percent per year that regular-plan funds paid to distributors. over a long holding period that gap compounded into real money, and piggy was one of the first indian apps to build a clean mobile interface around the direct-plan idea rather than the older website-based routes.

piggy went through y combinator's summer 2017 batch. the founding trio (ankush singh with co-founders kunal sangwan and nikhil mantha) built the product for about nine years. by 2025 the interface was routing about 250 million dollars in assets under management, small on the indian scale where groww and zerodha coin measured aum in the tens of billions but real money against a lean team. on 30 may 2025 users received an email that the app and web portal would shut down thirty days later. on 30 june 2025 piggy went dark.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the users lost ~

piggy was careful to point out that the money itself was safe. mutual-fund units in india sit with the fund house and its registrar (cams or kfintech), not with the aggregator. piggy was only the interface. when the interface went away the units stayed put, accessible through the fund house portal or the mf central utility or a competitor's app. redemption orders placed before 30 june processed as normal. dividends kept flowing to the registered bank account.

what users did lose was their sip schedule. all systematic investment plans set up through piggy were auto-cancelled between 15 and 20 june 2025. sips could not be transferred to another platform. users who wanted to keep monthly contributions running had to log into an amc site or a competitor app and set up each sip again, one fund at a time. for a user with fifteen or twenty active sips this was a real chore. many of them simply did not restart the smaller ones.

~ the decline ~

piggy's founding thesis (direct plans, no commission, clean ui) was correct and got adopted by the whole market. that turned out to be the problem. once zerodha coin and groww both moved to zero-commission direct-plan routing, piggy's one differentiator was gone. groww in particular scaled to over 10 million kyc-completed users while piggy stayed in the low hundreds of thousands. the small-team economics did not survive a market where the differentiation had leaked to the incumbents.

by 2024 co-founder nikhil mantha had moved to cred as head of cred wealth, the personal-finance layer inside kunal shah's cred payments app. the shutdown email in may 2025 was framed as a wind-down rather than a sale. no distributor bought the user base. the piggy website simply went dormant, the app was pulled from stores, and the founders redirected their attention to the next thing.

~ what remains ~

piggy leaves a small mark in the indian fintech story: the yc-backed direct-plan pioneer that never scaled past the incumbents but validated the category during a window (2017 to 2020) when direct plans were still an insider trade. every large indian mutual-fund app that today defaults to direct plans is building on ground that piggy helped clear, even if piggy itself never captured the users it made possible.

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