Prithi Rathi Gupta, an alumna of Harvard Business School, has changed the landscape of finance for Indian women. Her project LXME (named after Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth and good fortune) aims to bridge the gap between men and women in the areas of money management and investment knowledge.
Launched in India in 2020, LXME is an online application meant for managing investments and financial planning. In 2021, Gupta revamped the platform with education as one of its core components. LXME 2.0 not only aids women in investing in their specific goals but also provides regular content through the LXME blog.
The platform, which operates on the principle “ Knowledge is Power”, offers community-sourced discussions, planning tools, investment products, financial insurance, and learning modules to help women have access to information they need to build their financial acumen. The blog covers various topics such as coping with financial stress, optimizing surplus funds, and essential guidelines for personal loans.
For Gupta, who noticed a wide gender gap in financial ability between men and women in India, the idea to create LXME came in business strategy class at Harvard Business School, when she was asked to choose a business and formulate a go-to marketing strategy for it. "When I pitched it [LXME] in class, most of the men asked, ‘Why do you need a separate platform for women?' she recalled in an interview published by the school. “The women all said, ‘Wow, can we take it back to our countries? I wish I had something like this.’ So that was a huge validation.”
Currently LXME has over 50,000 women on its platform, and Gupta aims to expand its reach further to include at least 20 million women in the next three to four years. “If a woman knows what will happen when she puts her money in a product, she is capable of making an informed choice. The wealth then goes back into families, because that’s where women typically tend to put the money—back into families, children, and community—and that impact can be huge,” Gupta maintained.
