Mochatrade, a Y Combinator-backed trading platform that lets Indian users trade contracts linked to US stocks with money deposited through UPI, has raised $5.56 million in total funding, including a seed round led by CoinFund.
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Coinbase Ventures and Nicky Montana, general partner at Zero Knowledge Ventures, also took part in the round.
Mochatrade said it will use the money to build its trading engine and risk infrastructure and to reach more active Indian traders.
The startup allows users to fund their accounts through UPI and track their trading margins, profits and losses in rupees. It also offers perpetual futures contracts linked to the share prices of US companies, enabling users to take long or short positions without opening a US brokerage account.
Perpetual futures have no expiry date, and users do not own the underlying shares. According to Y Combinator, Mochatrade lists contracts on stocks such as Tesla, Nvidia and Apple, commodities including oil, gold and silver, and leverage of up to 50 times. Leverage lets traders open larger positions with less upfront capital, but it also magnifies losses.
The startup said its markets are designed for continuous access and real-time settlement, subject to liquidity, asset availability and risk controls. It earns money through trading fees and has no plans to launch a token for now, Manda told The Block.
The platform is still in beta. Its waitlist has crossed 25,000 sign-ups, but the company has not announced a public launch date.
It plans to add contracts linked to select pre-IPO companies, US stock options and social trading features, subject to applicable laws and regulatory approvals.
“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. We are building Mochatrade so an Indian trader can fund with UPI, see P&L in rupees, and know exactly what to do,” Utkarsh Sinha, co-founder and CEO of Mochatrade, said.
Mochatrade was founded in April 2026 by Sinha, Manda and Parth Maheshwari, and was part of Y Combinator’s Spring 2026 batch. It has 11 full-time employees across New York and Bengaluru.
Sinha studied at IIT Kharagpur and Columbia University. He previously built Martian Wallet, a crypto wallet that crossed 2 million installs across more than 50 countries and processed about $2 billion in volumes before it was acquired by an exchange, according to the company’s Y Combinator launch post.
Manda, the Chief Product Officer, was director of product at Sprinklr. Maheshwari, the CTO, led engineering at an Indian fintech lending startup and worked on Photoshop for the web at Adobe.
Both are IIT Guwahati graduates, and they earlier co-founded Meadow, which was acquired by a Y Combinator company.
Mochatrade’s contracts are structured as crypto-based derivatives rather than securities trades, which is what allows rupee funding, according to reports.
Through its Indian entity, ALSD Technologies Private Limited, the company is registered with the Financial Intelligence Unit India (FIU-IND) as a Virtual Digital Asset Service Provider and a reporting entity for anti-money laundering purposes.
That registration covers anti-money laundering compliance and is not an approval of the product. In September, FIU-IND issued notices to 15 virtual digital asset service providers for not complying with the Prevention of Money Laundering Act and asked them to take down their apps and websites.
The finance ministry said at the time that “Crypto products and NFTs are unregulated and can be highly risky. There may be no regulatory recourse for any loss from such transactions.”
