Coinfund Leads Mochatrade’s USD 5.5 Mn Seed Funding

Trading platform Mochatrade on Tuesday announced raising USD 5.5 million in total funding for its US Markets trading platform for India. 

The round was led by CoinFund with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Zero Knowledge Ventures, among others. Earlier backers include Y Combinator and Pioneer Fund. 

Mochatrade is registered with FIU-IND as a Virtual Digital Asset Service Provider. The company aims to make it easier for Indian traders to trade US markets from India using payment options like UPI. The platform shows things like margin, money set aside for trades, and profit or loss in rupees. 

They can go long or short through perpetual future contracts linked to US company prices, without opening a US brokerage account. The contracts have no fixed expiry and users don’t own shares. Leverage allows larger positions with less upfront money, magnifying gains and losses.

Utkarsh Sinha, Co-founder and CEO, Mochatrade, said, “India traded $1.9 trillion in options premium turnover last year. The appetite to trade is already here. But when Indians want to trade the U.S. market, the product still feels foreign. We are building MochaTrade so an Indian trader can fund with UPI, see P&L in rupees, and know exactly what to do. Our investors understood that from our first conversation.”

Chetan Manda, Co-founder and CPO, Mochatrade, said, “Most U.S. market products make Indians do extra work. Move money in an unfamiliar way. Think in dollars. Convert every gain or loss back into rupees. We want to change this. We’re building a world-class trading experience that feels familiar to Indian users.”

“We see a lot of companies that want to give one market access to another. Most underestimate how much of the work is local- payments, compliance, banking, the specific habits of the trader you are actually serving. Mochatrade’s founders started there and built the market infrastructure to match, in that order. That sequence is rarer than it sounds, and it is why we led this round,” Alex Felix, Managing Partner, Co-Founder and Chief Investment Officer, CoinFund, added.