Fintech Start-up Raise Financial Services Secures $22 Million from BEENEXT & Others
Raise Financial Services, a fintech platform has secured $22 million in a Series A fundraising round. BEENEXT and its current investor Mirae Asset Venture Investments lead the financing.
Rocketship.vc, 3one4 Capital, and angel investors including Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau, Meesho co-founders Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal, neobanking platform Jupiter creator Jitendra Gupta, Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar, and Whiteboard Capital's Sandeep Tandon participated in the round.
Raise Financial Services was created in January 2021 by Pravin Jadhav, the former CEO of Paytm Money, and owns and administers the stock trading platform Dhan, which competes with Groww, Zerodha, and Upstox. According to the firm, $15 million of the Series A funding would be invested in Dhan, with a goal of 1 million users in the next 15 months.
Raise purchased Mumbai-based stockbroking business Moneylicious Securities in August 2021, just months after launching. Raise obtained the necessary licences to become an integrated online stock broker by acquiring the SEBI-registered firm. Raise now offers trading on all exchanges (BSE, NSE, MCX), as well as membership in and across segments (equity, futures, exchange-traded funds, options, commodities, currency).
Dhan will benefit from the investment by bolstering its product, engineering, operations, and customer experience teams. Raise also plans to launch technology-driven consumer financial services in the areas of lending, insurance, investments, payments, and wealth management, according to the company.
Dhan's focus is on long-term investors and traders with a few years of expertise in the market, since Indians are increasingly taking control of their finances and there is a large untapped potential for trading on the stock market.
Aside from Dhan, the business plans to use the funds to develop another product.
Jadhav expressed his thoughts, “we are delighted to find a product-market fit with our first product - Dhan among retail investors and super traders. With this financing, we are planning to launch our second product in the investing vertical - that is built for first time investors, millennials and Gen Z.”
The Dhan app now has over 24 features for traders and investors, with more to come every few weeks in the next months. Jadhav told Moneycontrol in an interview before the app's debut in September 2021 that the business planned to create solutions for Tier I and II consumers.
BEENEXT's Managing Partner, Hero Choudhary, stated, “we have closely watched the retail participation on stock markets in India over the past 24 months. This momentum in investing and trading is irreversible, we expect this to grow exponentially. We are convinced that the next market leader will be a platform like Dhan.”
Dhan's long-term goals include wealth management for HNIs, insurance, payments, mutual funds, loans, and card goods. For its push into lending, the business would also explore asking for a non-banking financial company (NBFC) licence, according to Jadhav.
Mirae Asset Venture Investments' Managing Partner and CEO, Ashish Dave, stated, “in a very competitive market, Dhan already has 100,000 users who switched from other investing platforms to Dhan. Retail investing in India is only set to grow from here and Dhan with its offerings is set to be the platform of choice.”
Dhan also partnered with TradingView, a US-based charting tool, in December 2021 to allow users to trade directly through charts in stock, options, and futures for indices, commodities, and currencies.
In February 2021, Raise announced its seed round fundraising, which was headed by Mirae Asset Venture Investments and was unknown in value. CRED founder and CEO Kunal Shah, PhonePe co-founders Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari, Freshworks founder and CEO Girish Mathrubootham, Shaadi.com founder Anupam Mittal, Razorpay co-founders Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, Udaan co-founder Amod Malviya, and Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamoorthy are among the company's investors.
Rocketship.vc, 3one4 Capital, and angel investors including Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau, Meesho co-founders Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal, neobanking platform Jupiter creator Jitendra Gupta, Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar, and Whiteboard Capital's Sandeep Tandon participated in the round.
Raise Financial Services was created in January 2021 by Pravin Jadhav, the former CEO of Paytm Money, and owns and administers the stock trading platform Dhan, which competes with Groww, Zerodha, and Upstox. According to the firm, $15 million of the Series A funding would be invested in Dhan, with a goal of 1 million users in the next 15 months.
Raise purchased Mumbai-based stockbroking business Moneylicious Securities in August 2021, just months after launching. Raise obtained the necessary licences to become an integrated online stock broker by acquiring the SEBI-registered firm. Raise now offers trading on all exchanges (BSE, NSE, MCX), as well as membership in and across segments (equity, futures, exchange-traded funds, options, commodities, currency).
Dhan will benefit from the investment by bolstering its product, engineering, operations, and customer experience teams. Raise also plans to launch technology-driven consumer financial services in the areas of lending, insurance, investments, payments, and wealth management, according to the company.
Dhan's focus is on long-term investors and traders with a few years of expertise in the market, since Indians are increasingly taking control of their finances and there is a large untapped potential for trading on the stock market.
Aside from Dhan, the business plans to use the funds to develop another product.
Jadhav expressed his thoughts, “we are delighted to find a product-market fit with our first product - Dhan among retail investors and super traders. With this financing, we are planning to launch our second product in the investing vertical - that is built for first time investors, millennials and Gen Z.”
The Dhan app now has over 24 features for traders and investors, with more to come every few weeks in the next months. Jadhav told Moneycontrol in an interview before the app's debut in September 2021 that the business planned to create solutions for Tier I and II consumers.
BEENEXT's Managing Partner, Hero Choudhary, stated, “we have closely watched the retail participation on stock markets in India over the past 24 months. This momentum in investing and trading is irreversible, we expect this to grow exponentially. We are convinced that the next market leader will be a platform like Dhan.”
Dhan's long-term goals include wealth management for HNIs, insurance, payments, mutual funds, loans, and card goods. For its push into lending, the business would also explore asking for a non-banking financial company (NBFC) licence, according to Jadhav.
Mirae Asset Venture Investments' Managing Partner and CEO, Ashish Dave, stated, “in a very competitive market, Dhan already has 100,000 users who switched from other investing platforms to Dhan. Retail investing in India is only set to grow from here and Dhan with its offerings is set to be the platform of choice.”
Dhan also partnered with TradingView, a US-based charting tool, in December 2021 to allow users to trade directly through charts in stock, options, and futures for indices, commodities, and currencies.
In February 2021, Raise announced its seed round fundraising, which was headed by Mirae Asset Venture Investments and was unknown in value. CRED founder and CEO Kunal Shah, PhonePe co-founders Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari, Freshworks founder and CEO Girish Mathrubootham, Shaadi.com founder Anupam Mittal, Razorpay co-founders Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, Udaan co-founder Amod Malviya, and Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamoorthy are among the company's investors.
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