Grip Invest Appoints Ankit Dokania CFO as Platform Eyes EBITDA Profitability 2026
The fixed-income investment platform has promoted its internal finance head to CFO as it nears EBITDA breakeven, targets 150 per cent year-on-year growth, and prepares to scale across asset classes and distribution channels.
When a company promotes its internal finance head to CFO rather than hiring externally, it is usually making two statements at once: the function has matured enough to deserve the title, and the person who built it from the ground up knows the business better than anyone brought in from outside.
Grip Invest has announced the elevation of Ankit Dokania to the role of Chief Financial Officer. Dokania, who joined Grip Invest in January 2023 as Vice President of Finance and Compliance, has been a driving force behind the company’s progress.
In his expanded mandate as CFO, Dokania will drive Grip’s financial strategy across three key priorities: strengthening financial governance across its multi-regulated, multi-entity structure, ensuring best-in-class compliance standards to protect investor interests, and scaling the treasury function to support Grip’s next phase of growth.
The promotion arrives at an interesting moment for the platform. Dokania said Grip Invest gave him a rare opportunity to build a finance function from zero and grow with the business at every step. He described the CFO designation as a commitment to the next chapter, with the immediate focus being EBITDA profitability while the company is already at the threshold, and continuing to grow at over 150 per cent year on year.
Nikhil Aggarwal, Founder and Group CEO of Grip Invest, said Dokania played an important part in shaping Grip’s financial strategy at every critical milestone, from structuring the company’s debt capital architecture to starting up its Broking division and NSDL depository operations. Aggarwal noted Dokania had operated well beyond the traditional finance mandate, contributing directly to how the platform was built and scaled, and said the elevation reflects both the depth of his contribution and the scale of what lies ahead.
Grip Invest was founded in 2020 by Nikhil Aggarwal, Vivek Gulati, and Aashish Jindal to solve a problem that most Indian retail investors did not know they had: approximately Rs 100 trillion sitting in low-yield bank fixed deposits simply because better-regulated alternatives were not accessible. As a SEBI-registered Online Bond Platform Provider, the company now gives investors access to corporate bonds, securitised debt instruments, and high-yield fixed deposits, with minimum investment thresholds as low as Rs 1,000 for some products. The platform has been trusted by over 6 lakh investors and has enabled investments worth Rs 2,500 crore since inception.
The timing of the CFO appointment signals that Grip Invest is preparing for a more demanding regulatory and operational environment, particularly as it scales its broking and depository arms. Proximity to EBITDA profitability is a significant milestone for a platform in the fixed-income space, where the unit economics are inherently different from high-velocity transaction platforms. The bigger question is whether Grip can convert its 150 per cent growth rate into sustainable margin expansion even as it broadens its product offering. A CFO who built the finance function from scratch, understands every decision taken along the way, and holds the institutional memory of the company is, in that context, arguably the right person for the job.
