Raise Financial Services raises $22 million in Series A; allocates $15 million for trading platform Dhan

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Fintech platform Raise Financial Services has raised $22 million in a Series A funding round, the company said on January 25. The round was led by BEENEXT and its existing investor Mirae Asset Venture Investments.

The round also saw participation from 3one4 Capital, Rocketship.vc and angel investors such as Meesho co-founders Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal, Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau, Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar, neobanking platform Jupiter founder Jitendra Gupta, and Sandeep Tandon of Whiteboard Capital.

Raise Financial Services was founded by former Paytm Money CEO Pravin Jadhav in January 2021 and owns and manages stock trading platform Dhan which competes with the likes of Groww, Zerodha and Upstox. The company said that $15 million of the Series A fundraise will be invested in Dhan where the company is eyeing a user base of 1 million in the next 15 months.

Within months of starting up, Raise had acquired Mumbai-based stockbroking firm Moneylicious Securities in August 2021. Through the acquisition of the SEBI-registered company, Raise secured the requisite licences to become an integrated online stock broker offering trading on all exchanges (BSE, NSE, MCX), membership to the and across segments (equity, exchange-traded funds, futures, options, currency, commodities).

The investment in Dhan will be to strengthen its product, engineering, operations and customer experience teams. Raise also aims to set up technology-led consumer financial services across financing, insurance, investments, payments and wealth, the startup said.

With Indians increasingly taking control of their investments, coupled with the huge untapped potential for trading on the stock market, Dhan’s focus is on long-term investors and traders who have a few years of experience in the market.

Besides Dhan, the company is also looking to launch another product using this investment.

“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,” Jadhav said.

The Dhan app offers over 24 features for traders and investors and the company plans to unveil more every few weeks over the next few months. In an interview with Moneycontrol ahead of the app’s launch in September 2021, Jadhav had said that the startup wanted to build products for Tier I and II customers.

“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,” Hero Choudhary, Managing Partner, BEENEXT, said.

For its future plans, Dhan will look at wealth management solutions for HNIs, insurance, payments, mutual funds, lending and card products. The company will also consider applying for a non-banking financial company (NBFC) license for its foray into lending, Jadhav had said.

“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,” said Ashish Dave, Managing Partner and CEO at Mirae Asset Venture Investments.

In December 2021, Dhan also tied up with US-based charting platform TradingView to allow users to trade directly through charts in equity, options and futures for indices equity, commodity and currency.

Raise had announced its seed round funding in February 2021 which was led by Mirae Asset Venture Investments, the size of which is undisclosed. A host of entrepreneurs, including CRED founder and CEO Kunal Shah, Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamoorthy, PhonePe founders Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari, Razorpay co-founders Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, Freshworks founder and CEO Girish Mathrubootham, Udaan co-founder Amod Malviya and Shaadi.com founder Anupam Mittal are also invested in the company.