The company expects the $15 million investment in Dhan will pay off as the trading platform might grow its user base to one million in the next 15 months.
Raise Financial Services has raised $22 million in a Series A funding round, of which $15 million will be used to fuel the development and expansion of its trading platform, Dhan.
Founded by former Paytm Money CEO Pravin Jadhav in January 2021, Raise owns and manages Dhan, a stock trading platform that competes with the likes of Groww, Zerodha, and Upstox.
In August 2021, Raise acquired Mumbai-based stockbroking firm and SEBI-registered company, Moneylicious Securities, which resulted in Raise securing the required licenses to become an integrated online stock broker offering trading on all exchanges (BSE, NSE, MCX).
Raise is using the acquired authorizations to set up Dhan as a multi asset trading platform with an offering that spans across all segments: equity, exchange-traded funds, futures, options, currencies, and commodities.
In December 2021, Dhan partnered with US-based charting platform TradingView to allow users to trade directly through charts in equity, options and futures for indices equity, commodity and FX.
The $15 million investment will boost Dhan’s product, engineering, operations and customer experience teams as well as expand the product range to include financing, insurance, investments, payments, and wealth management.
Dhan has plans to boost its wealth management offering to include HNIs, insurance, payments, mutual funds, lending and card products.
Pravin Jadhav, Chief Executive Officer of Raise Financial Services, commented: “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 fundraiser was led by BEENEXT and its existing investor Mirae Asset Venture Investments, and 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.
Hero Choudhary, Managing Partner, BEENEXT, said: “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.”
Ashish Dave, Managing Partner and CEO at Mirae Asset Venture Investments, 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.”
