WillJini Valued at $3.5M After First Round From Batchmates, Friends and Channel Partners Following Three Years of Bootstrapped Growth

New Delhi: Estate planning and inheritance platform WillJini has raised its first external round from a group of SPJIMR batchmates, close friends and some of its own channel partners, marking a new phase for a business that has spent three years building and growing without institutional capital. The company, founded by Jugal Popat, Rahul Shah and Jatin Popat said the capital will be used to expand its advisory team, strengthen its technology infrastructure and enter new geographies.

The fundraise comes after WillJini grew its monthly revenue from around Rs 3 lakh to Rs 50 lakh while remaining bootstrapped. Unlike the conventional startup fundraising route, where venture capital is often pursued early in a company’s growth cycle, the company said it was approached by people within the founders’ network who had followed the business closely. Eleven batchmates, including Jugal’s own roommate from campus, invested in the round, and five influential wealth management companies came in as well. Some of WillJini’s channel partners also participated, bringing capital from people already familiar with the company’s work and the estate-planning market. The round values WillJini at $3.5 million post-money.

For Jugal Popat, the decision to raise was less about following the startup funding playbook and more about finding people who understood the problem the company was trying to solve. The founders had spent years making decisions around cash constraints, often pushing initiatives into the next quarter because the resources were not available to pursue them immediately. The new capital is intended to change that equation, particularly around hiring, technology and geographic reach.

Investors who participated in the round echo that conviction.

“In my career spanning almost three and a half decades, I have seen more wealth destroyed by the absence of a Will or a trust. Bharat has 1.4 billion people and crores of new crorepatis popping up, but almost no one has a succession plan. WillJini is making Will-making as easy as ordering food online, legal, secure and affordable. This isn’t just a fintech, it’s a family tech,” said Priyesh Sampat, a Mumbai-based Wealth Advisor who invested in WillJini.

“I invested in WillJini primarily for three reasons, the massive market opportunity, a problem worth solving, and having personally known both the founders. Living in the US, I’ve seen how established this industry is there. It made me realise how much room there is for adoption and awareness in India,” said Sapan Gandhi, SPJIMR batchmate and investor.

“Having known Jugal and Rahul for a decade, I have seen how they leverage their complementary strengths while working towards a singular vision. This investment was a natural next step,” said Pranav Byatnal, another batchmate and WillJini’s first investor.

The timing also reflects a larger shift in India’s wealth landscape. Estate planning remains relatively underpenetrated even as Indian households accumulate and transfer increasingly significant assets across generations. Industry estimates frequently cited in the estate-planning sector suggest that only a small fraction of Indians have formally prepared a Will. Meanwhile, a report by EY-Julius Baer estimates that US$1.3 trillion in wealth (in India) is expected to pass to younger generations by 2030, highlighting the scale of the broader intergenerational wealth-transfer opportunity.

In India, the challenge is not limited to writing a Will. Families often have to navigate succession, nominations, property ownership, financial assets, family structures and legal processes, making inheritance planning considerably more complicated than simply documenting how assets should be distributed. That complexity has historically kept estate planning away from mainstream financial conversations.

WillJini’s own journey predates the current startup conversation around estate-tech. The business originated with practicing lawyer Jatin Popat, Jugal’s father, who was repeatedly approached by CEOs to prepare their Wills. In 2013, he began treating those requests as a business rather than an occasional professional favour. For years, the market remained relatively quiet. Jugal Popat, an SPJIMR MBA and former Swiggy executive, joined the business full-time in 2022, bringing systems and a more structured operating approach to a practice that had largely been built through individual expertise.

That long gestation period is also central to the company’s decision to remain bootstrapped for as long as it did. Rather than prioritising fundraising, WillJini focused on building a customer base and developing distribution through financial intermediaries. The company says it has now served more than 20,000 customers across 480 cities and 32 countries.

The latest round is therefore less a starting point than a transition. With capital now available, WillJini plans to invest in a larger sales organisation, technology infrastructure and geographic expansion. Its channel-partner participation also gives the fundraise a different dimension: some of the people putting money into the business are already part of the ecosystem through which WillJini reaches customers.

The company believes the opportunity is comparable to other categories that initially required consumer behaviour to change before the market could scale. Estate planning, it argues, is still at an early stage in India, much like insurance was several decades ago: necessary, but not yet part of routine household financial planning.

“Apart from capital, the round brought permission to think bigger,” said Jugal Popat.

For WillJini, that ambition also comes with the responsibility of building awareness around estate planning itself. The company is attempting to develop a category in which awareness, education and adoption need to grow alongside the business. In that sense, its challenge is not simply to capture an existing market, but to help create one.

WillJini says it has been operating in the estate-planning and inheritance space for 12 years and has served more than 20,000 customers across 480 cities and 32 countries. It works with financial institutions and distribution networks on succession planning and aims to make having a Will a more mainstream part of household financial planning. WillJini is the official succession planning partner of India’s leading financial institutions including HDFC Group, Tata Group, Yes Group, IIFL, Incred Wealth, and many more.