An archived chat line for SEBI advisers and brokers, ready for audit
TL;DR Replyvault gives small SEBI-registered firms a business chat-app number where every client chat is captured, time-stamped and kept in a form they can hand to an inspector or a court. The firm pays a monthly fee per adviser. It works because SEBI now accepts chat-app records, but only if firms can prove them.
Indian clients message their adviser or dealer on chat apps, not email. Until March 2026 that left brokers unsure whether a chat counted as proof of a client's order. SEBI then told one broker that a chat-app order from the client's registered number can count, provided the logs are retrievable and verifiable for any investigation, and that in a dispute the broker must prove it under electronic-evidence law[1].
That puts the burden squarely on the firm. Most small advisers run client conversations on a personal phone.
If the phone is lost, the employee leaves or a chat gets deleted then the record is simply gone. Large banks buy global archiving suites, but a three-person advisory shop has nothing sized for it.
What it does, in regulatory terms: record-keeping and supervision software for regulated intermediaries. It does not give advice, take orders or hold client money, so it needs no SEBI licence itself. Its customers stay fully responsible under their own registration.
Each adviser or dealer gets a business chat-app number run through the chat app owner's official business platform. Clients chat as they do today. Every message, voice note and file is copied to tamper-evident storage in India, tagged with the client's registered number and stamped with a trusted time. A compliance officer can search by client, pull an export for an inspection, and flag chats that look like order instructions so the dealer confirms them.
The seed proposed homomorphic encryption and confidential computing for "secure communication". I dropped that, because it's slow and expensive and it solves secrecy when the regulator is asking about proof. Standard encryption at rest plus a clean audit trail does the job just fine.
The user is the adviser or dealer, but the payer is the firm's owner or compliance officer. Buyers are SEBI-registered investment advisers, research analysts, portfolio managers and small stock brokers. They already pay for compliance audits and registration fees, so a per-seat monthly subscription is a familiar purchase. No public price exists for an India-sized version, and global tools are sold to large banks on quote.
SEBI's interpretive letter of 20 March 2026 is the trigger, because it makes chat-app records usable but conditional[1]. The Stock Broker Master Circular of July 2025 already requires evidence of pre-trade confirmation[1]. CERT-In has required 180-day logs since 2022[5], and the DPDP Act raises the cost of a careless leak.
The narrowest countable base is SEBI's own register - 1,056 investment advisers[2] and 2,304 research analysts[3], plus small brokers not counted here. No public figure exists for what Indian firms spend on message archiving. If a few hundred firms paid for five seats each, that is a real but modest business, which is why the price must stay low and the sales cost lower.
One global archiving vendor captures the major chat apps for financial firms, with supervision and data-loss controls[4]. Another captures email, voice, chat and mobile channels for compliance teams[6]. Both sell to large institutions. I found no tool priced and packaged for India's small SEBI-registered firms, and the brokers' own back-office vendors have not filled the gap publicly.
| Difficulty | Moderate (34/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹60 L–1.1 Cr |
| Time to launch | 6–9 months |
The software isn't exotic. The hard parts are proving the archive holds up as evidence, staying inside the platform owner's business messaging rules, and selling to thousands of tiny firms without an expensive sales team. Expect most of the first year to go into distribution, not code.
Replyvault itself needs no SEBI licence, since it gives no advice and takes no orders. Your customers hold the registrations and the duties.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
Don't let AI decide whether a message was a valid order or whether advice was suitable. Those are regulated judgements, and the firm's compliance officer makes them.
Want to work out the AI layer for Replyvault? Talk to Yash →
This one is worth a shot for a founder who knows SEBI compliance and can sell through adviser associations and compliance consultants. If you want to build a deep-tech encryption company then skip it, because the buyer does not care one bit. First prove that 20 firms will switch client chats to a new number, and that a lawyer will sign off on the evidence trail.
Plan for roughly ₹60 L–1.1 Cr, mostly for secure storage, the chat-app integration and selling into compliance teams.
No. Your customers are the registered intermediaries. You still build to SEBI's record conditions, CERT-In directions and the DPDP Act.
Yes. Archiving is a mature category abroad. Each market's securities regulator sets its own record-keeping rules, so check those first.
The free Replyvault validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the SEBI and data-protection checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for advisers and compliance officers, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Replyvault or something close to it? The make-or-break work is getting clients to move to a new business number without losing the relationship, and I've seen how tricky that move can be. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.