Moneygrow Asset PMS
Our view on their team, the pedigree, the funds & investment philosophy followed.
IME's Review of Moneygrow Asset PMS
| AMC Rating | Pedigree Rating | Team Rating | Philosophy Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
Upgrade | Upgrade | Upgrade | Upgrade |
AMC View
While MoneyGrow's founding team does clearly have strong credentials, these credentials are in institutional equities & private equity, and neither Manish or Viraj have prior experience managing a listed equities portfolio. In this context, we would wait for the fund to mature a bit before recommending MoneyGrow more aggressively to investors.
AMC Pedigree
MoneyGrow does have a solid investments team, and have the potential to develop into a strong niche PMS player. However, we would wait to see the performance of their strategies over a slightly longer period of time, before getting a clearer view on the firm.
Team Pedigree
Moneygrow's Investment team comes with a strong level of finance pedigree - Manish Gupta has over 16 years of Institutional Equities experience at CLSA, while Viraj Mahadevia has private equity experience at Actis (a large EM private equity fund). While the team indeed has strong credentials, neither Manish or Viraj come with a past track of fund management in listed Indian equities.
Investment Philosophy
MoneyGrow follows a 4P framework —> Promoter, Product, Profitability, and Price - focusing on management quality, business moat, earnings, and valuation. Their investment process blends both top-down and bottom-up approaches to identify opportunities.
AMC Background
MoneyGrow Asset, headquartered in Mumbai, positions itself as a professionally run asset manager with a clear institutional orientation. The investment platform is led by Manish Gupta, Managing Director, who brings over 24 years of experience in Indian equities. He spent 17 years at CLSA in senior leadership roles across Mumbai and New York, advising a broad spectrum of global institutional investors including FIIs, mutual funds, insurance companies, private equity funds, and sovereign wealth funds. His background spans equity research, capital markets transactions, and institutional advisory, providing MoneyGrow with a strong public-market and capital-allocation pedigree. The core investment team is further strengthened by Viraj Mahadevia, Fund Manager, who brings over two decades of experience with deep private equity exposure through Actis, one of the largest emerging market PE platforms, along with prior M&A and capital markets roles at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup in London.
Investment Philosophy
Their philosophy combines core compounders with selective exposure to special situations. Core investments are businesses that are fundamentally sound, cash-flow generating, financially resilient, and operating in growth segments with clear medium-term visibility. Alongside this, MoneyGrow is willing to invest in special situations—companies that may currently be underperforming their true potential due to transitional factors such as management change, balance sheet restructuring, or asset divestments, but are expected to normalise within one to two years and converge toward core-quality characteristics.
4P Investment Framework
MoneyGrow follows a structured 4P framework to evaluate investment opportunities, ensuring that business quality, growth potential, financial strength, and valuation discipline are assessed holistically before capital is deployed.
Promoter
A strong promoter is viewed as the cornerstone of long-term value creation. The firm prefers management teams with a demonstrated track record of navigating businesses through multiple economic and industry cycles, including periods of stress. Emphasis is placed on high standards of corporate governance, marked by transparency, accountability, and integrity in disclosures and capital allocation decisions. A growth-oriented mindset, coupled with prudent decision-making, is considered critical to sustaining long-term shareholder value.
Product
MoneyGrow looks for businesses operating in large and expanding opportunity sets, where the scale of the addressable market allows for sustained growth over extended periods. Industry structure is analysed to ensure that competitive intensity still permits adequate profit pools for participants, avoiding sectors where value is structurally competed away. Long-term sustainability of demand and growth, rather than short-term cyclical spikes, is a key determinant of product attractiveness.
Profitability
The framework prioritises fundamentally sound companies with healthy operating margins, conservative leverage, and robust cash flow generation. Return ratios and balance sheet strength are evaluated to assess resilience across cycles. Beyond current financials, the firm actively looks for businesses with strong earnings growth trajectories and identifiable levers that can drive further improvement in profitability over time, such as operating leverage, mix changes, or efficiency gains.
Price
Valuation discipline forms the final filter in the investment decision. MoneyGrow employs a combination of absolute and relative valuation metrics to assess whether a stock offers a reasonable entry point relative to its growth and quality attributes. The firm consciously avoids stocks trading at extremely rich valuations, particularly where prices are driven by investor exuberance rather than underlying fundamentals, viewing such situations as asymmetric on the downside.
Private-Equity Mindset in Small and Mid Caps
In its small and mid-cap strategies, MoneyGrow explicitly adopts a private-equity-style mindset within public markets. This includes bottom-up identification of emerging sub-sectors, early-stage participation in scalable businesses, and willingness to hold through volatility once governance comfort is established. The firm seeks to capture the dual benefit of earnings compounding and valuation re-rating as businesses mature and attract broader institutional ownership. Valuation is assessed primarily through cash-flow-based lenses, with price discipline serving as a key risk-management tool rather than the sole investment filter
Investment team
Manish Gupta | 3-star rated FM
Founder | 25 yrs Experience | 3 yrs at current firm
Past Experience: CLSA
Manish has over 24 years of experience in Indian equities, including 17 years with CLSA in Mumbai and New York where he advised leading FIIs, sovereign wealth funds, insurers, mutual funds, and private equity investors on Indian markets, and was involved in numerous IPOs, QIPs, placements, and block trades. He holds an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, an integrated M.Tech from IIT Delhi, and is a CFA charterholder from CFA Institute, USA.
Viraj Mahadevia | 3-star rated FM
Portfollio Manager | 22 yrs Experience | 2 yrs at current firm
Viraj has over 20 years of experience in finance, including a decade in Private Equity with Actis, one of the largest emerging market PE funds with USD 7.5 billion AUM, and over five years in M&A and capital raising across healthcare and consumer sectors at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup in London. He holds an MBA in Finance and Leadership Change Management from ISB Hyderabad and a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Recommended Funds
Experience the benefits of working with a 'research-first' investments firm
Free 15-Day Trial of IME RMS App
Get complimentary access to the revolutionary IME RMS App (direct access to IME's central team insights across 1000's of MFs, PMSs, AIFs & Global funds - a first in the industry).
Additionally, a dedicated private banker will help build your financial plan, investment mandate & undertake a comprehensive portfolio review for free.
