CREST is a Mumbai-based wealth management startup building a fractional family office for ultra-rich founders, business owners, and institutions. The CREST family office has raised $3.1 million, or ₹29.3 crore, in a pre-seed round as it tries to turn a very old, very relationship-driven business into something more structured and tech-enabled. Wealthy Indian families increasingly want one partner to coordinate investing, succession, reporting, and governance instead of stitching together banks, lawyers, tax advisors, and brokers on their own. CREST was founded in 2025 by ex-LEAP India VP Zuhaib Khan and former Welspun One co-chief investment officer Girish Singhi.
What does CREST family office actually do?
At a basic level, CREST sells a fractional family office. It tries to provide the kind of strategic layer a dedicated family office would offer—investment oversight, planning, governance, and reporting—without asking every client to build a full in-house setup. Its public materials show 3 visible operating pieces: family office services, a SEBI-registered investment advisory practice, and a portfolio management service for public-market investing.
The workflow is more concrete than the vague “wealth platform” label suggests. CREST’s planning pages describe a 3-step process: discovery, where it maps a client’s financial picture and family dynamics; structuring, where it designs a framework around protection, growth, and liquidity; and stewardship, where it keeps updating the plan as life and markets change. On the family office side, the firm frames the relationship as an initial consultation, followed by strategic design, then an ongoing partnership with regular oversight and reporting.
The investment engine is also fairly specific. CREST’s PMS materials describe equity, balanced, and thematic strategies, with a filtering funnel that starts from 6,000-plus listed companies. It narrows to 1,200 on quality, then 300 on valuation, then 80 for deep research, before landing on 20 to 25 final holdings. Portfolio construction runs on research and allocation. Continuous review, position caps, and sector diversification are built into the process. That’s a lot more institutional than the usual relationship-manager model wealthy clients often get from legacy distributors.
For the client, the appeal is simple. Instead of handling public-market allocation in one place, estate planning in another, and governance conversations nowhere at all, CREST is trying to bundle the whole stack. Singhi summed up the pitch as “everything a family office does, in one place.” And because the platform is invite-only and referral-led, it’s aiming for a curated, high-trust customer experience rather than a mass affluent play.
Who founded CREST family office and what experience do they bring?
The founding story
CREST came out of stealth in June 2026, but the company traces its founding to 2025. Khan and Singhi started it around a pretty obvious gap: India has more founder wealth, more business-family liquidity events, and more cross-border complexity than ever, yet much of the advisory market still runs on product distribution, fragmented service providers, or old private-banking relationships. CREST’s answer is a fractional family office aimed at India’s “top 0.01%,” working mainly with founders, business owners, and what it calls value creators across Asia.
Why the founders fit this market
Singhi looks like the investing half of the founding story. CREST’s leadership profile says he has 16-plus years across private equity and public capital markets, has raised and deployed more than $3 billion across asset classes, has built and scaled asset management platforms, and has advised large single-family offices. Before CREST, he was co-chief investment officer at Welspun One.
Khan brings a different angle. CREST’s bio says he has 16-plus years of entrepreneurial experience across Asia, Europe, and Africa, plus buy-side M&A experience, due diligence expertise, and angel investments across 57 startups. The source article ties that to his earlier role as a VP at LEAP India, while another profile lists him as vice president for international expansion at Leap Scholar. Both founders are listed as FMS Delhi alumni on CREST’s leadership page.
Early traction and fundraising
CREST is live, not just conceptual. The company launched initially with asset allocation services, and its current public setup shows active family office services alongside a registered investment advisory arm and a PMS business. Its RIA registration is valid from August 7, 2025. LinkedIn places the team in the 11-50 employee band. That’s meaningful for a firm that’s still at pre-seed stage and only recently stepped out of stealth.
On the money side, CREST raised $3.1 million in pre-seed funding led by Atrium Ventures, BEENEXT, DeVC, Sparrow, Shastra VC, Warmup Ventures, and 91ventures. More than 40 angel investors also joined, including Amit Ranjan of SlideShare, Chirag Taneja of GoKwik, Revant Bhate of Mosaic Wellness, and Shantanu Deshpande of Bombay Shaving Company. The company will use the capital for its tech platform, family office and investment hiring, compliance depth, and new asset management offerings across Indian and global public markets plus real estate.
Who CREST competes with
This isn’t a greenfield market. Waterfield Advisors has spent years positioning itself as an independent multi-family office and pure-advisory alternative to bank-led wealth management, while Julius Baer has a much bigger global private-bank machine and an India-focused family office playbook. Then there’s the broader set of private banks, distributor-led wealth desks, and boutique advisors already serving HNIs and UHNIs.
CREST’s pitch is narrower and a bit more pointed. It says the model is fiduciary-first, retrocession-free, and incentive-aligned, with buy-side teams acting almost like outsourced CIO, CFO, and COO functions for wealthy families. If that works, the edge isn’t just better investment advice. It’s tighter coordination across wealth, operations, governance, and succession. Basically, the messy stuff that gets ignored until a liquidity event or family transition forces it into view.
Why does the CREST family office round matter?
Pre-seed money into a wealth-management startup isn’t just a branding exercise. In CREST’s case, the check will fund the least glamorous parts of the business: compliance, regulatory muscle, hiring, and the internal systems needed to manage sensitive client relationships. That matters because family office clients don’t forgive operational mistakes. One weak control process can kill trust fast.
The round also suggests investors think founder wealth is becoming its own venture category. A lot of startup wealth in India used to exit into a private bank, a distributor, or a loose circle of advisors. CREST is betting that a new class of wealthy operators wants something more organized and more aligned—especially after liquidity events, secondary sales, or business restructurings. It’s a real thesis. It’s also a hard one to execute.
There’s another signal here. CREST isn’t stopping at advisory. Its roadmap points toward broader asset management in public markets and real estate. If it can win the right families early through planning and allocation, it can later move up the value chain into higher-ticket investment mandates.
How big is India’s family office market?
The raw demand story is big. The source article pegs India at more than 9 lakh millionaires, with that number expected to nearly double by 2030 alongside $2.4 trillion in new financial wealth. UBS’s 2025 wealth report adds another datapoint: India added about 39,000 new dollar millionaires in 2024 alone, a 4.4% jump year on year.
The family office category is also maturing quickly. Julius Baer’s India family office playbook says the number of family offices in India rose from 45 in 2018 to nearly 300 in 2024. It also estimates roughly 13,000 ultra-high-net-worth families today, growing to 19,000 by 2028, with about $1.3 trillion set to change hands through intergenerational transfer over the next decade.
And the money isn’t sitting idle. Domestic family offices have backed more than 230 Indian startups so far, and Mumbai alone has seen around 62 family offices participate in startup funding. So this market isn’t only about wealth preservation anymore. It’s also about alternatives, direct bets, governance, and figuring out how to professionalize family capital before complexity outruns the family itself.
Can CREST family office stand out?
CREST family office is going after a real problem, and the timing makes sense. India’s wealthy founder class is getting larger, family structures are getting more complex, and the old distributor-heavy model doesn’t look great when clients want one place to manage capital and continuity.
But this is still a trust business first and a tech business second. If CREST can turn its invite-only, white-glove promise into a repeatable operating model—without sliding into the same product-selling habits it criticizes—it could build a sharp niche in India’s modern family office market. If not, it’ll just be another boutique with a polished website.
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FAQ
- What funding did CREST raise? CREST raised $3.1 million, or ₹29.3 crore, in a pre-seed round announced on June 16, 2026. Atrium Ventures, BEENEXT, DeVC, Sparrow, Shastra VC, Warmup Ventures, and 91ventures led the round, with more than 40 angels joining as well.
- How does CREST family office work? CREST works like a fractional family office that combines planning, advisory, and investment management under one umbrella. Its process starts with discovery, moves into structuring around growth, liquidity, and protection, and then shifts into ongoing stewardship. Its investment arm runs PMS strategies across equity, balanced, and thematic portfolios.
- Who are the founders of CREST? CREST was founded in 2025 by Zuhaib Khan and Girish Singhi. Khan brings M&A, due diligence, international operating experience, and angel investing exposure, while Singhi brings deep experience from private equity, public markets, and asset management, including his earlier role at Welspun One.
- Is CREST in wealth management or asset management? It’s in both, which is part of the point. CREST started with asset allocation services, but its public setup now spans family office services, registered investment advisory, and portfolio management. That puts it in the overlap between wealth management, family office advisory, and early-stage asset management.
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