Serial entrepreneurs Edul Patel and Prince Arora along with Edul’s friends Rohit Goyal and Alankar Saxena set out to work on their belief that crypto will remain one of the largest asset classes in the world.
They are attempting to ‘democratise’ investment opportunities in cryptocurrencies through their startup Mudrex, which was launched in 2018. Simply put, it works as a ‘mutual fund investment’ layer for cryptos, providing simple and seamless investment products.While Edul, Rohit, and Alankar are alumni of IIT Bombay, Prince is an alum of IIT Kanpur.
The exchange that did not work
Originally, the four friends too started building a cryptocurrency exchange in 2018. They built the infrastructure, including the order matching engine and custody wallets.
This decision pushed the team to rethink everything and decided to focus on building a global product, rather than focus on India alone as crypto is a global asset.
They also realised that exchanges would become commoditised and businesses then will need to have massive scale. Lastly, automation was the only way you could trade and scale investing in crypto. But at the time, there were no companies building the infrastructure or tools to enable this.
Edul explains with a $2 trillion market cap, crypto is one of the fastest-growing asset classes today. However, there are some roadblocks to manual trading.
Building the new platform
The four began by building a no-code editor tool, which lets anyone create a trading algorithm. The beta version was launched in October 2018. By December, the startup got its first 100 users and also got selected for Y Combinator’s winter cohort of 2019.
While at YC, grew to 500 users. The founders say they learnt two key things during this time — both good and bad traders need help with investing, and building a business by selling a SaaS tool would not be the best utilisation of the product. The output of the tool, the algorithms were more valuable. Edul adds that Mudrex was in the best position to get distribution for it and monetise it.
This led the team to build a monetisation layer and a marketplace. The first version of the marketplace was launched in August 2019 and by December, it had 2,000 signups and a lot of feedback.
“We went back to the drawing board to iterate our strategy and launched version 2.0 of the marketplace in April 2020 and rebranded it to ‘Mudrex Invest’. Since then, there has been no looking back,” says Edul.
On Mudrex, traders create their own trading bot without any coding. The platform uses analytics and historical data to help them evaluate their bot’s strategy. At present, it hosts a 95-97 percent investor base with a 3-5 percent creator base that has grown organically.
