Raise Financial Services has onboarded Alok Pandey as co-founder and chief tech officer (CTO) as it continues to scale its new stock trading and investment platform Dhan, the company said on March 29.
Before Raise, Pandey was co-founder and CTO at Rupeeseed Technologies, a systems and solutions provider for financial services companies. He has over 16 years of experience in software development and management specifically in the stockbroking and investment industry.
Pravin Jadhav, founder of Raise, said, "We are delighted to welcome Alok as Co-Founder at Raise and also to lead our engineering teams. He joins us at an exciting time as we start scaling our first product - Dhan. We are confident that an experienced technology leader like him with deep domain experience will help us build and ship our products faster for investors & super traders."
At Rupeeseed, Pandey designed and developed core exchange trading platforms including order management systems, risk management systems and deployed the same across 50 plus investment platforms.
"Raise has shipped its investment and trading platform - Dhan - in the fastest possible time and I am looking forward to building a great engineering team and shipping many products at Raise. I am personally excited about the opportunity to build technology-led financial services, starting with the investing stack," said Pandey.
Jadhav, who was formerly managing director and CEO of Paytm Money, founded Raise in January 2021. The company's trading platform Dhan competes with Groww, Zerodha and Upstox among others and focuses on long-term investors and super traders.
The company raised its seed round funding in February 2021 led by Mirae Asset Venture Investments, and announced the acquisition of Mumbai-based stockbroking firm Moneylicious Securities in August 2021. Through the investment, Raise secured the licences required to start an investment and trading platform.
Jayprakash Gupta, founder of Moneylicious Securities, too joined Raise as co-founder as part of the acquisition.
Raise secured $22 million in its Series A round led by BEENEXT and its existing investor Mirae Asset Venture Investments. The round also saw 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.
The startup launched Dhan in September last year with an aim to onboard a million users in 18 months. Of the $22 million secured in the Series A round, $15 million will be invested in the Dhan platform to strengthen its product, engineering, operations and customer experience teams.
