Tradelab, a Bangalore-based startup which has developed an online trading platform to help brokers as well as casual traders, has secured a $390K seed round from Rainmatter, a fin-tech startup incubator. Rainmatter has also invested a seed amount of $40K in two other fin-tech startups, Opentrade Financial Services and Inherit.
Tradelab, founded in 2012 by Sandeep Kumar Mishra and Biplab Sinha, operates an advanced online trading platform, built not just for professional brokers but also for regular people. With its platform, TradeLab aims to develop trust among regular people so as to encourage them to go for online brokering.
The most recent trading platform coming out of Tradelab is called Pi. Pi is a Business-to-Business software which combines the power of both analytics and trading. The software has already been under months of beta testing with thousands of testers. It claims to currently have over 10,000 users for the product which is being used to trade on both NSE, BSE as well as in the commodity market.
Biplab Sinha, Co-founder at TradeLab says,
People want minimum human intervention. We wanted to develop a product that acts as a trading platform and performs analytics, allowing not just brokers but regular people also to trust online brokering.
Rakesh Ranjan, CFO of the company, said,
TradeLab will provide complete solutions to stock brokers from August 2015 as we will integrate Pi (front-end) with in-house Order Management Systems (OMS) platform, currently in alpha phase. At the same time, we want to expand our reach to international market.
Considering how India has lagged way behind western markets when it comes to blending technology within brokering, Pi looks to be one of the very first steps in breaking that barrier. And investors at Rainmatter clearly see the potential this platform holds.
Nithin Kamath, Founder & CEO of Zerodha (parent company behind Rainmatter) says,
A retail trader in India until now was forced to spend between Rs. 2000 to Rs. 15000 per month for subscribing to a professional analytics suite. The huge entry barrier has been a deterrent, probably one of the reasons for very shallow retail market participation.
The revenue model of the company is primarily built on number of user licences issued to its clients. In addition, it also charges for software support to clients.
Earlier, Tradelab was incubated at SRIC, IIT Kharagpur and received seed funding of Rs 15 lakh in December 2012. Now, it will be incubated by Rainmatter, which provides physical work space, mentorship and networking with investors and experts in the financial technology sector. The incubator currently houses seven more fin tech startups and invests upto $1 Million as seed round.
