Mochatrade, a trading platform for Indian users, has raised $5.5 million in a seed round led by CoinFund, with Coinbase Ventures and Zero Knowledge Ventures also investing, the company said on Tuesday, October 27. Y Combinator and Pioneer Fund backed it earlier.
The platform offers perpetual futures contracts that track the prices of US stocks, indices and commodities. Users fund accounts through UPI and see margins, profits and losses in rupees, so they need neither a US brokerage account nor a dollar balance. The contracts have no expiry, users do not own the underlying shares, and positions can be opened with borrowed money, which magnifies both gains and losses, The Economic Times reported. Mochatrade earns money from trading fees.
The company was founded this year by Utkarsh Sinha, Parth Maheshwari and Chetan Manda. Sinha previously built Martian Wallet, which was later acquired, and Maheshwari led payments and credit infrastructure at Navi. The new money will go into the trading engine, risk systems and reaching more active Indian traders. Mochatrade also plans contracts on select pre-IPO companies, US stock options and social trading features, subject to applicable laws and regulatory approvals.
Why it matters: Indian investors who want US shares today mostly buy them through brokers under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme, which means dollar transfers and conversion costs. Mochatrade avoids that step because it never holds the shares, and its lead investors come from crypto, where perpetual futures are a standard product. Its planned features depend on approvals it does not yet have, and SEBI tightened rules on retail derivatives trading in 2024, so a margin trading product sold through UPI is likely to draw close regulatory attention.
Source: Entrackr; The Economic Times
Image: Jeffrey Zeldman from Manhattan, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
