Former Swiggy CTO’s trading app Sahi eyes up to $50 mn at $500 mn valuation

Bengaluru: Sahi, a stock trading app founded by former Swiggy chief technology officer Dale Vaz, is in talks to raise $40-50 million at a valuation of $400-500 million, two people aware of the development said. The company hired an investment bank last month to run the fundraising process, the people added.

“The company is pitching to Indian and overseas venture capital firms, but the talks are still at a very early stage,” one of them said. Mint could not ascertain whether any new investors have committed to the round.

Sahi is pitching itself as an alternative to established discount brokers, combining lower brokerage fees with free, in-house charting tools and AI-powered features, one of the people said.

Its AI assistant, Kyro, lets users analyze charts, review past trades and create custom indicators through plain-language instructions, according to the company’s website. However, trading decisions and order placement remain with the user.

At the upper end, the valuation would be 2.5 times the $200 million that Sahi was valued at in April, when it raised $33 million in a Series B round led by Accel's growth fund, with participation from Elevation Capital and Accel India. That came 10 months after a $10.5 million Series A round at a valuation of about $60 million.

Online brokers, primarily operating on a discount-broking model, accounted for 76–78% of active NSE clients in FY25, up from 38–40% in FY20, according to a September 2025 study by consulting firm Redseer, commissioned by Groww for its IPO. The wider investment and wealth-management industry, which includes discount brokerages, represented an estimated ₹1.1 trillion revenue opportunity in FY25, Redseer said. It projected this would reach ₹2.2–2.6 trillion by FY30.

Sahi declined to comment on Mint’s queries emailed on Monday.

Targeting power traders

Founded in 2023 by Vaz and former Kotak Securities executive Manish Jain, Sahi launched its app in December 2024. Like most online brokers, it earns mainly from brokerage, a fee charged on every executed order.

After a 30-day free period, Sahi charges a flat ₹10 an order on futures and options (F&O) contracts, tied to the future price of a stock or index. Its competitors Groww and Dhan charge a flat ₹20 per executed F&O order. Zerodha charges ₹20 for options and ₹20 or 0.03% of the order value, whichever is lower, for futures.

“With the ₹10 pricing, an active trader may get up to 50% savings on their brokerage, but they stay because of the product experience, the simplicity, and the speed,” Vaz said in an interview with Mint last month.

Sahi’s brokerage revenue depends on how often customers trade, making frequent traders particularly important to its business. Those who trade more than 100 times a month make up about half its base but account for about 80% of transactions, Vaz said.

Tackling cognitive load

Low brokerage fees and easy account opening are no longer enough to set brokers apart, Vaz said. Platforms are now competing by offering more market data and trading tools, but users must spend time learning how to use them. “We are actually drowning users in cognitive load,” he said, referring to the effort needed to process that information and make trading decisions.

Sahi's answer is a single screen that shows a trader's charts, option prices, open positions, orders and profit or loss, and lets them trade from the same place. On most apps, these sit on separate screens.

Sahi built its own charting engine, the software that displays price movements and indicators traders use to analyze the market. Developing it in-house allowed the company to integrate charts with order execution, so users can track prices and place trades from the same screen, Vaz said.

Deep-pocketed rivals

Sahi is still a small player. It had 281,028 active clients on the NSE in September, ranking 17th with a 0.61% share, according to NSE data. An active client is one who has traded at least once in the past year. Sahi's base grew 11% from August, the fastest among the top 20 brokers.

Groww leads with 13.45 million active clients, a 29% share and about twice Zerodha's 6.79 million. Dhan is eighth with 1.12 million. Groww, which entered stock broking in 2020, overtook Zerodha in September 2023, when it had 6.63 million active clients to Zerodha's 6.48 million. Zerodha had led since 2019.

Sahi also faces stiff competition from rivals that have raised much larger funding rounds. Groww raised about $596 million from investors before it listed in November 2025, and now has a market value of about ₹1.24 trillion. Dhan's parent, Raise Financial Services, raised $120 million at a $1.2 billion valuation in October 2025. Zerodha, which has never raised outside capital, reported a net profit of ₹4,283 crore in fiscal 2026.

Customer acquisition is a key expense for online brokers, which compete for attention through digital advertising, influencer partnerships and promotional offers. The challenge is not just getting someone to download an app or open an account, but persuading them to start trading and keep using the platform.

Word-of-mouth referrals and videos showcasing the app help keep Sahi’s customer acquisition costs down, Vaz said. But the company is not looking to compete with mass-market brokers on customer numbers. Instead, it is targeting people who want to manage their investments more actively, rather than those content to start a systematic investment plan (SIP) and leave it running. “There is a large base of people who are currently passive, but who would like to take control over their financial future,” he said.