[Funding alert] Raise Financial raises $22M in Series A round from BEENEXT, Mirae Asset Ventures, others

Raise Financial Serviceshas announced it has raised $22 million from BEENEXT and Mirae Asset Venture Investments in Series A financing. The round also saw participation from 3one4 Capital, Rocketship.vc, and angel investors including Udaan's Sujeet Kumar, Vidit Aatrey, Sanjeev Barnwal of Meesho, and neobanking startup Jupiter's Jitendra Gupta, according to an official statement.

Started by Pravin Jadhav, who earlier headed Paytm Money, in January 2021, the fintech firm's first product, trading platform Dhan, was launched in November last year.

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Raise Financial plans to invest $15M in Dhan over the next few months, and plans to strengthen its product, operations and engineering team, according to the statement.

"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,” said Pravin in a statement shared by the company.

Raise Financial also plans on launching other offerings in the finance space including insurance, wealth management and in the investment space.

Dhan, which was operating in an invite-only phase, recently opened its app for all. It currently has over 100,000 downloads on Google's Playstore. While downloads might not be the most reliable metric to track as many people can download an app but never use it, it does show how well a new app is doing.

The trading platform's growth comes at a time when India is witnessing an influx of new retail investors entering the trading floors due to the stock market's bull run throughout the pandemic.

“We have closely watched the retail participation on stock markets in India over the past 24 months. This momentum in investing & trading is irreversible, we expect this to grow exponentially," said Hero Choudhary, Managing Partner, BEENEXT.

Raise Financials raised a seed round from Mirae Asset Venture Investment in February, last year.

"We at Mirae Asset have seen the journey of Raise closely. In under a year, Pravin has built a strong team of over 125 people. They launched Dhan and also achieved product-market fit with a very promising & powerful product which is a testament to our seed investment. In a very competitive market, Dhan already has 100,000 users who switched from other investing platforms to Dhan for its superior product offering and experience," said Ashish Dave, Managing Partner & CEO, Mirae Asset Venture Investments.

Dhan currently competes with other trading platforms including Nitin Kamath-led Zerodha, and Tiger Global-backed Groww.