Mochatrade raises $6M to offer US stock perpetuals to Indian traders

Mochatrade has raised approximately $6 million to bring something unusual to Indian retail traders: leveraged, always-on bets on US stocks, funded in rupees.

CoinFund led the seed round. Coinbase Ventures joined, along with Nicky Montana, general partner at Zero Knowledge Ventures. Mochatrade announced the raise on Monday.

The money, and how some of it arrived

The total includes an earlier pre-seed round worth $690,000. That round was backed by Y Combinator and Pioneer Fund.

The most crypto-native detail is how the accelerator paid. Y Combinator’s $500,000 check landed earlier this month entirely in USDC on Base, according to co-founder and chief product officer Chetan Manda, who spoke to The Block.

USDC is a dollar-pegged stablecoin. Base is Coinbase’s blockchain network. Translation: one of Silicon Valley’s best-known startup programs funded a company with digital dollars instead of a bank wire.

What Mochatrade actually sells

Mochatrade offers perpetual futures, often called perps, through a mobile app. Think of a perp as a bet on a price that never expires. You don’t own the stock. You hold a contract that tracks it, and you can keep that position open as long as you want.

The platform lists more than 50 US stocks, along with commodities, indices and select crypto assets. It also offers exposure to pre-IPO names such as SpaceX and Anthropic, companies that ordinary retail traders typically cannot buy at all.

Leverage goes as high as 50 times. At that level, a small price swing becomes a large gain or loss. A move of 2% against a fully levered position can be enough to erase it.

Traders can deposit Indian rupees through UPI, the country’s instant payments system. No US brokerage account is required, and no foreign remittance is needed.

Built on Hyperliquid

Under the hood, Mochatrade runs on Hyperliquid, a blockchain platform built for trading. The company says this gives it sub-second execution speeds.

Markets on the platform run 24/7, with real-time settlement. Traditional brokerages operate on exchange hours and settle trades on a delay.

The team and the regulatory status

Mochatrade was founded in New York in 2026 by three IIT alumni: Utkarsh Sinha, Chetan Manda and Parth Maheshwari.

The trio has done this before. They previously built Martian Wallet, which reached 2 million installs and processed over $2 billion in volume before it was acquired. Manda also previously served as Director of Product at Sprinklr.

On the regulatory side, Mochatrade is registered as a Virtual Digital Asset Service Provider with FIU-IND, India’s Financial Intelligence Unit. That registration positions its futures within India’s rules for virtual digital asset derivatives.

The contracts are structured as crypto-based derivatives, not as traditional securities trades, and that classification is what makes rupee funding over UPI possible.