Product, Profitability, Patience, and the Power of Focus: How Raise Financial Services Built Dhan - India’s Fastest-Growing Fintech Platform

India’s fintech landscape has matured at extraordinary velocity. Over the past decade, the country has evolved from enabling biometric identity and instant settlement for payments to building high-performance, globally competitive exportable platforms for payment acceptance and digital identification. Amid this transformation, few companies have demonstrated what true product precision and execution excellence look like as clearly as Raise Financial Services, the parent company of Dhan.

Last week, Raise announced a $120 million Series B round, joining the unicorn club less than three years after its first product launch. What’s remarkable is not just this valuation milestone, but the quality of the business that has earned it: over ₹1,000 crore ($120M) in annual revenue, +65% positive EBITDA, and sustained profitable growth within just 12 months of product launch — a rarity in high-growth fintech anywhere in the world.

Profitability paired with high growth is no longer the exception in Indian fintech — it’s a new competitive advantage. Dhan proves that precision software engineering and disciplined execution can compound faster than imagined in India.

Prepared Minds, Convergent Conviction: The Market Signal We Backed in 2022

At 3one4 Capital, we had been evaluating the brokerage space since 2015, but we were waiting for the right team to deploy our thesis with. By 2022, most investors believed the brokerage market was saturated and that the winners were already decided. A few platforms had crossed $100 million in annual revenue, some heading for IPOs, and the consensus view was that new entrants had no room to differentiate. But at 3one4 Capital, we saw an untapped opportunity that still persisted.

While the incumbents had expanded horizontally — layering personal loans, gold, credit cards, FDs, and mutual fund SIPs on top of brokerage and execution — they had become generalists. These general-purpose investment platforms had educated a large retail investor base and had simplified the onboarding journey with a focus on UX simplicity (something for everyone) and accessible educational content. However, the user segment that generated the majority of the industry’s profit pool, the professional traders, remained underserved.

These generalist platforms were now addressing everyone and serving no one in particular. They competed on mind share and MAUs, not milliseconds. We believed the next breakout would emerge as a platform that was purpose-built with deep tooling for the most demanding user cohort — professional traders who live for and profit from speed, reliability, and precision.

Our research showed that this segment represented the most stable, high-retention profit pool in the industry. Yet, no startup had built dedicated, high-performance trading infrastructure optimized for them. This required institutional-grade bottom-up infra-heavy software innovation, and a team that had the domain expertise to build it.

That insight shaped the foundation of our thesis: there was room to build a focused, high-tech product suite for professional traders that could earn multi-$100M volumes within five years.

It was a contrarian view in 2022 — but it was exactly the kind of thesis we work to build at 3one4 Capital: off-consensus, deeply technical, and requiring founder-level expertise that only the outlier teams possess.

Meeting Pravin Jadhav (PJ): The Founder Who Turned a Contrarian Thesis into a Category Challenger

When Anurag Ramdasan and I first spoke to P J, the conviction resonated instantly. Pravin had already spent over 15 years building India’s most respected fintech platforms, from Freecharge to PayTM Money. His depth of insight into investor behavior, the compliance stack, and product engineering was unmatched.

He wasn’t interested in building another brokerage app. He wanted to build a new-generation financial institution defined by transparency, trust, and technological superiority.

Our early conversations centered on two fundamental questions:

• Could India support a grounds-up platform purpose-built for professional traders? Repeatability and retention were critical, demanding a founder with deep vertical expertise and the discipline to design for a demanding user base.
• Could such a company reach $100 million in revenue and profitability within five years? The bar was set high, given the competitive nature of this segment and the lateness of entry.

The answer to both was a resounding yes, if the right team executed with relentless focus.

That alignment became the cornerstone of 3one4 Capital’s partnership with Raise. We invested in the Series A round, at the precise inflection point when liquidity depth and capital markets participation were accelerating in India post-COVID. This was also the largest entry check we had made in a pre-product release company, reflecting our deep conviction and the alignment of prepared minds.

The best venture outcomes emerge when conviction meets capability, when a differentiated insight finds the founder built to prove it right.

The Product Flywheel: Building Dhan on the DEXT Stack

Pravin and his co-founders — Alok, Jay, and Raunak — began building Raise during the peak of COVID, choosing focus over noise. From their base in Mumbai, India’s financial capital, they deliberately stayed away from the frenetic startup activity of Bangalore. They set up operations in Borivali, far from the bustle of central Mumbai — a conscious decision to prioritize deep work and product craftsmanship over branding and visibility. In an era of loud hype cycles, this quiet conviction helped them build one of India’s most important new fintech platforms from the ground up.

From day one, Dhan has been built on a singular philosophy of unifying precision, reliability, and scale. This belief shaped the architecture of the company’s proprietary trading infrastructure, DEXT (Dhan Exchange Trading System).

DEXT integrates order management, risk management, and execution into a single real-time engine built entirely in-house. The results speak for themselves:

• 95% of orders processed in under 20 milliseconds
• 600-800% faster execution than industry benchmarks
• Seamless scalability to handle massive surges in India’s dynamic capital markets

Dhan went beyond just building sleek user interfaces to architect its own core trading engine with DEXT. This makes it the only major trading or brokerage platform in India to operate on a fully proprietary execution stack. It’s a rare and defining achievement in an industry that has traditionally relied on third-party vendors for order management and execution systems.

DEXT transformed Dhan from another brokerage app into a full-stack trading platform with persistent world-class performance.

Around it, the Raise team built an ecosystem that serves every stage of an investor’s journey:

• ScanX – real-time market research and analytics
• Upsurge – a learning hub offering 250+ finance courses
• Filter Coffee – a content platform delivering bite-sized market insights
• FuzzAI – an in-house AI model trained on large-scale financial data for contextual intelligence

Each product reinforces Dhan’s platform promise: a high-trust, high-performance experience built for serious investors.

In an ecosystem driven by user acquisition and MAUs, Dhan chose customer precision. This choice has paid off.

Technology as a Moat: Innovation That Compounds

DEXT and FuzzAI are not simple incremental upgrades; they represent a complete rethinking of how retail and professional traders will engage with markets.

By collapsing latency from ~120 milliseconds (industry benchmark) to under 20 milliseconds, Dhan redefined the standard for execution quality in India’s brokerage ecosystem. This engineering advantage compounds daily and can be measured in user trust, retention, NPS, and trading volumes.

Moreover, DEXT’s cloud-native architecture ensures elastic scalability, allowing the platform to process millions of trades per day without SLA degradation. FuzzAI, in parallel, adds a predictive intelligence layer that transforms data into actionable, personalized insights, a glimpse of how AI will shape the next decade of investing.

Speed, reliability, and intelligence are the new moats of modern fintech, and Dhan has scaled all three from first principles.

Execution as Strategy: Scaling with Purpose

Raise’s growth has been remarkable not only for its pace but also for its discipline. In under three years, the company scaled from zero to +₹1,000 crore in annualised revenue, achieving ₹650 crore in EBITDA and a +65% margin, while maintaining positive unit economics across every cohort of transactions.

Such results don’t happen by chance. Behind them lies a culture of obsessive engineering, financial prudence, and rapid customer-centric iteration.

At 3one4 Capital, our partnership with Raise has gone far beyond capital. Anurag Ramdasan, Siddarth Pai, Nruthya Madappa, Ashwini Thulsaram, Monica Umesh and our team have worked closely with Pravin and the leadership on:

• Product roadmap design – sequencing the roadmap of DEXT, ScanX, and FuzzAI to maximise network effects, retention, and margin expansion.
• Strategic acquisitions – identifying complementary capabilities to accelerate product development.
• Regulatory alignment – engaging early and proactively with regulators to ensure compliance and trust.
• Institutional interconnectedness – enabling Raise to interface with top-tier institutions across adjacent ecosystems, expanding capabilities through embedded fintech offerings and institutional trading workflows.
• CXO recruitment – strengthening the senior team with IPO-grade talent in engineering, finance, and risk.
• IPO architecture – building the operational and governance foundation for a future listing.
• Capital development – pacing the fundraise amid impending F&O regulatory changes, prioritising decision maturity and institutional alignment over haste. Though Dhan could have achieved unicorn status quarters earlier, the leadership chose patience and transparency to ensure long-term alignment with new investors and the evolving regulatory landscape.

Every step was guided by one shared goal: to make Raise a profitable, durable, and nationally credible fintech institution.

At 3one4 Capital, we believe venture investing must go beyond capital allocation. This is also about conviction engineering.

Our Thesis in Action

Every early-stage thesis at 3one4 Capital begins with one demanding question: What will it take for this company to scale profitably within five years?

With Raise, we saw the answer early. The combination of a large, underserved professional trader segment, an experienced founder with unmatched domain mastery, and the capacity to build proprietary tech inspired our confidence to invest against the consensus.

But conviction alone isn’t sufficient. The execution flywheel we build with founders like Pravin involves:

1. Tight product-market alignment — identify the high-value user segment defining the category’s profit pool.
2. Situational awareness — understand the competitive dynamics and work backwards from a clear definition of differentiation rooted in innovation.
3. Deliberate capital allocation — prioritize sustainable unit economics from day one.
4. Operational immersion — partner closely post-investment to recruit leadership, shape product roadmap direction, and embed governance into the foundation.

This is the playbook we’ve applied across sectors, from consumer internet to SaaS and fintech to deep tech, and its value is best demonstrated in Dhan’s journey.

When domain-aligned founders and conviction-driven capital work in tandem, profitability can become a function of design.

The Precision Generation: India’s Product Builders Come of Age

Dhan’s trajectory reflects a broader transformation: India’s new product companies are now competing per global benchmarks on performance, trust, and customer delight.

We are witnessing a generational shift: founders are not just building for India’s 700 million internet users and competing with national incumbents. They’re building with global design standards, execution velocity, and financial discipline that rival the best anywhere.

This evolution marks a turning point in India’s innovation narrative. The era of growth-at-any-cost is over. The defining companies of this decade will combine high growth with demonstrable governance, scale with repeatability, and engineering depth with profitability discipline.

India’s next generation of founders is proving that global-class products can be built from India, for India, and eventually for the world.

Congratulations to Pravin Jadhav ( P J ), his co-founders – Alok Pandey, Jay Prakash Gupta, & Raunak Rathi, and the Raise Financial Services team on this phenomenal milestone! What you’ve achieved in scale, speed, and profitability sets a new benchmark for India’s fintech ecosystem.

It has been a privilege for us at 3one4 Capital to partner with you from the early days and to continue championing your relentless pursuit of precision, growth, and innovation.

Dhan stands as a signal of what’s next for Indian product companies: high-trust, high-performance, and globally competitive from day one.

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