Fintech stock trading platform MarketWolf on Tuesday said it has raised $10 million (around Rs 79 crore) as part of its Series A funding round led by venture capital firm Jungle Ventures and Dream Capital, the corporate venture capital and acquisitions arm of Dream Sports.
Existing and other investors including 9Unicorns, iSeed, Crescent and Riverwalk participated in the funding round, said MarketWolf in a statement.
MarketWolf, operated by FnO India Securities Pvt. Ltd, will use the fresh capital to strengthen its product and hire across product, marketing and engineering teams, it added.
Founded in 2017 by Vishesh Dhingra (CEO) and Thomas Joseph (CRO), MarketWolf is a stock trading app targeted at first-time investors. It seeks to make stock trading experience jargon-free and easy. The startup says it charges brokerage fees only on profitable trades that allows users to manage risks and make better trading decisions in any market condition. Th startup has raised $17.4 million since its inception.
Vishesh Dhingra, founder & CEO of MarketWolf, highlighted that the app is "fast becoming the go-to stock trading platform for the mobile gaming generation, who likes to explore new and more immersive ways of doing things."
Arpit Beri, Principal at Jungle Ventures noted that retail participation in the stock market in India continues to remain abysmally low at 3-5% and MarketWolf can help change that.
"The company has already demonstrated tremendous stickiness and virality with its consumers and we are excited to be a part of their next stages of growth," added Beri.
Earlier in May, Jungle Ventures marked the final close of its fourth Southeast Asia and India focused venture capital (VC) fund at $600 million, higher than its initial target corpus of $350 million. It counts Indian startup unicorns such as Moglix and Livspace as its investee companies.
Dev Bajaj, who leads Dream Capital as the chief strategy officer for Dream Sports, said that disruptive gamification will happen across business-to-consumer (B2C) and MarketWolf is leading this effort in fintech.
Dream Capital aimed to make at least 15 early-stage bets and deploy a significant part of the present corpus in the next 12-24 months, it said in August last year. Dream Capital's investments include e-sports platform SoStronk and sports footwear and equipment brand Elevar. It also executed the acquisition of video game developer Rolocule, which has been rebranded as DreamGameStudios.
In April, Dream Capital led a $120 million Series A funding round in cricket non-fungible token (NFT) platform Rario in its largest deal so far.