Mochatrade, a Y Combinator-backed trading platform built for Indian users who want exposure to US markets, has raised $5.5 million in a seed round led by CoinFund. Coinbase Ventures and Nicky Montana, general partner at Zero Knowledge Ventures, also participated. Y Combinator and Pioneer Fund backed the company’s earlier pre-seed round.
The startup plans to use the fresh capital to strengthen its trading engine and risk-management infrastructure, and to widen its reach among active retail traders in India.
US market exposure, in rupees
Mochatrade lets Indian traders take positions on the prices of US companies such as Nvidia and Tesla without opening an overseas brokerage account. Instead of buying and holding shares, users trade perpetual futures contracts linked to US stock prices, which allow them to go long or short. The contracts carry no fixed expiry, and users do not own the underlying shares.
The key pitch is local payments. Users fund their accounts through UPI and see their margins, profits and losses in rupees, removing the friction of overseas remittances, dollar balances and repeated currency conversion. The platform earns through trading fees. Because trading is leveraged, both gains and losses can be magnified.
“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 US market, the product still feels foreign,” said Utkarsh Sinha, co-founder and CEO of Mochatrade. “We are building Mochatrade so an Indian trader can fund with UPI, see P&L in rupees, and know exactly what to do.”
Co-founder and chief product officer Chetan Manda said most US market products force Indian users to move money in unfamiliar ways and think in dollars, a gap the company wants to close.
What comes next
The platform is currently in beta. Mochatrade plans to introduce contracts linked to select pre-IPO companies, US stock options and social trading features, subject to applicable laws and regulatory approvals. The company has said it is working on its compliance architecture as it prepares for a wider rollout.
The founding team
Mochatrade was founded in 2026 by three IIT alumni. Sinha earlier built and scaled Martian Wallet to more than two million installs and around $2 billion in transaction volume before it was acquired. Manda was previously a director of product at Sprinklr, while CTO Parth Maheshwari worked on Photoshop on the web at Adobe before leading payments and credit infrastructure at Navi.
CoinFund managing partner and chief investment officer Alex Felix said the team had focused on India-specific requirements across payments, compliance, banking and trader behaviour, which was why the firm chose to lead the round.
Why it matters
India is one of the world’s largest retail derivatives markets, and demand for global market exposure continues to grow. Existing routes, such as overseas brokerage accounts under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme, involve remittance limits, settlement delays and currency friction. Mochatrade’s bet is that UPI-led funding and rupee-denominated accounting can make US market access feel as familiar as domestic trading, though the model will be closely watched as regulators weigh in on leveraged and offshore-linked products.
