Growth Story of Mudrex: A Global Crypto Investment Platform

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Mudrex is a Global Crypto Investment Platform backed by Y Combinator and Nexus Venture Partners that operates in 90 countries globally. It is a US-headquartered and Bengaluru-based fintech startup aiming to be the largest asset management platform for crypto investments. As of October 2021, the startup currently stands at over 50.000+ registered users and has assets under management amounting to $15 million.

StartupTalky interviewed Mr. Edul Patel (Co-founder & CEO, Mudrex) to get insights into the startup story and roadmap of the organization.

Mudrex - Company Highlights

Startup Name	Mudrex
Founders	Edul Patel (CEO), Prince Arora (VP, Engineering), Rohit Goyal (VP, DeFi), and Alankar Saxena (CTO).
Headquarters	US (Bangalore-based)
Founded	2018
Industry	Cryptocurrency, Fintech
Website	mudrex.com

Mudrex - About and Vision
USP of Mudrex
Mudrex - Industry Details
Mudrex - Idea and Inspiration
Mudrex - Founders and Team
Mudrex - Name, Tagline and Logo
Mudrex - Startup Launch
Mudrex - Growth
Mudrex - Mentor/Advisors
Mudrex - Competitors
Mudrex - Funding and Investors
Mudrex - Challenges Faced
Mudrex - Business Model & Revenue Model
Mudrex - Future Plans
Mudrex - FAQs

Mudrex - About and Vision

At Mudrex, the team has established a robust investment platform suitable for retail as well as seasoned traders. After closely following the crypto investment space for over three and half years, they created simple-to-invest and hassle-free products with a better risk/reward ratio that will help the next billion users join and participate in the crypto revolution.

Products Offered by Mudrex

Mudrex Portfolio: The idea behind the product is to democratize access to investment opportunities in financial markets for investors. This product will provide access to sharp and insightful trading strategies that were earlier available only to high-net-worth individuals. The product is created to make an easy-to-follow process for cryptocurrency investments. The platform builds a portfolio bundle using top-performing algorithms for different risk-reward profiles. An investor starts with choosing a portfolio based on their risk-reward expectations. It then offers trading strategies and products that are most suited to their risk profile.
Mudrex Coin Sets: Mudrex Coin Sets are baskets of crypto tokens that will help users generate good returns in the long term. These crypto baskets are automatically managed and re-balanced periodically to ensure that they are improved as the market changes. Coin Sets is one such product that will allow investors to mitigate risk by diversifying investment in cryptocurrencies. It is a mutual fund-like product with a better risk-reward ratio. The product is designed to expand retail participation in crypto investment, curated suitably for investors who look at crypto investments as long-term wealth creation

Mudrex’s long-term vision

Mudrex aims to become a one-stop solution for crypto investment needs. It will achieve this by expanding the user community, providing superior tools to advanced portfolio managers.

Mudrex's Short-term vision

On an immediate basis, its vision is to improve accessibility to crypto investment for retail investors. Hence, the team will soon launch the Mudrex application and introduce tools to ease the process. Simultaneously intend to educate and debunk myths around crypto investing for beginners and novice investors in the space to accelerate the process.

USP of Mudrex

Being a holistic destination for all crypto investment requirements remains its biggest USP. Unlike other cryptocurrency exchanges in India, the Mudrex platform is hassle-free, easy to use, and equally supports trading and investing communities to test out strategies and grow wealth consistently.

Another major differentiator is the no coder feature offered to seasoned traders. This was introduced as the team realized that global exchanges that are open 24*7 do not provide accessible tools and proper infrastructure to trade. On the other hand, only 1-2% of the retail investor base holds the knowledge of crypto trading, hence Mudrex is trying to spread awareness and educate them on crypto as an asset.

Mudrex - Industry Details

The startup did extensive research to find out the market size for one of the most rapidly expanding industries in the world. Different sources point out that by 2025 the crypto asset management industry would be clocking more than $12.5 Billion per year. Mudrex's growth estimates suggest that it will be able to scale up to capture 1% of that market share.

Mudrex - Idea and Inspiration

During the ideation phase of Mudrex, the team reached out to approximately 200 users experienced in the crypto space. They got a unanimous response stating that automating trading in cryptocurrencies was a revolutionary move. They then closely monitored the interaction with these users to understand their pain points. The founders & the entire team worked very hard to create a product that solves this unique problem. Apart from these 200 people, they reached out to various Discord communities to receive feedback and constantly improve the product and the user experience.

They figured that trading in the crypto market which remains open 24*7 was significantly different from trading the stock markets. The team initially built Mudrex with the idea to make money for themselves. When they started building Mudrex in Oct 2018, the founders just wanted to solve their own problems. Automating trading was hard, finding quality strategies and signal providers was difficult, and the crypto world was filled with scams. They wanted to build a trustworthy, reliable, and scalable platform that just works and helps them grow their money.

2 years from that point, in Oct 2020, Mudrex made its first investment from the company's books. The team paper traded for 6 months, ran countless backtests, and detailed risk analysis. After all, this was the company’s money, not something they could just afford to play with.

Mudrex - Founders and Team

Mudrex is a team of four co-founders from IIT Bombay and IIT Kanpur - Edul Patel (CEO), Prince Arora (VP, Engineering), Rohit Goyal (VP, DeFi), and Alankar Saxena (CTO).

Talking about Edul Patel's background, he has over 10 years of deep-rooted experience in finance, entrepreneurship, and building tech-driven applications. His domain expertise lies in product and & risk management. Edul graduated from IIT Bombay in 2011, post that he went to Deutsche Bank and worked there for a couple of years in trading and investing. He left Deutsche Bank in 2013 to start his own company called Niffler. At Deutsche, Edul met Prince Arora (Vice President, Engineering) who was his CTO at Niffler, a tech lead in his next company, and now Co-Founder in Mudrex. ‘Nifler’- a $1 Million funded startup by SAIF partner (that eventually got acquired by Tapzo. Edul became the head of product at Tapzo, and it eventually got acquired by Amazon, and he didn't want to go to Amazon. So Prince and Edul both left Tapzo and started working on Mudrex. They started doing this in about September 2017.

In September 2017. The duo got their third co-founder, Rohit Goyal (Vice President, DeFi). Edul has known him for the last 15 years now. He was a junior at IIT Bombay. Post IIT, he started his own company called Saabziwaala.com, which was acquired by Big Basket. After that, he started working on his own gaming company and created multiple casual games for over three years. After that, he came to Bangalore, started staying with Edul, and saw how interesting it was to work on Crypto.

Mudrex's fourth co-founder is Alankar Saxena (CTO) who was four years junior to EDul at IIT Bombay. He started his career at Twitter, worked on personalization and scaling and Twitter security as well. He came back and started working at a credit lending startup, very quickly realizing that credit lending in India is an Operations problem and not a tech problem to solve. He joined Mudrex eventually.

Now Mudrex is a team of 25 to 30 people, about 70% to 80% are ex-IIT, Ex-NIT, Ex-BITS, Ex-Google, Ex- Microsoft, and 60% are ex-founders who have built and sold their businesses to other companies in the past. So, Mudrex has a strong entrepreneurial team.

Mudrex - Name, Tagline and Logo

‘Mudrex’ comes from the amalgamation of the Mudra exchange. Mudra refers to tokens, and therefore the name implies an exchange to trade tokens.

The tagline of Mudrex is ‘simplifying investing.’ The founders knew that trading cryptocurrencies were cumbersome, and simplifying the process was their unique proposition.

Mudrex Logo

Mudrex - Startup Launch

Mudrex started by having extensive one on one conversations with different sets of people through Twitter and Discord communities. It reached out to close to 2000 such people to land its first set of 100 users.

Mudrex's primary strategy while going from 100 to 10000 was scaling up its various online communities. The team followed this up with a referral campaign. As they started growing, the startup entered into partnerships with various influencers.

Mudrex - Growth

On average, Mudrex is at revenue growth of 100% month on month. It currently stands at over 50.000+ registered users. Mudrex has assets under management amounting to $15 million (as of October 2021).

Mudrex - Mentor/Advisors

Mudrex is fortunate to have advisors such as Nexus Venture Partners, Village Global, and other VCs such as Kunal Shah, Anand Chandrashekharan, and Anjali Bansal.

Mudrex - Competitors

Mudrex has transitioned itself into an investing platform for the cryptocurrency market. Some of the international competitors are BlockFi, Celsius, Nexo, etc.

Mudrex - Funding and Investors

Mudrex's funding details are as follows:

Date	Stage	Amount	Investors
Jan-Mar, 2019	Pre-seed	$750k	Y Combinator, Better Capital
Aug 2021	Seed	$2.5 Mn	Nexus Venture Partners with participation from Village Global, Kunal Shah, Anand Chandrashekharan and Anjali Bansal

"With the funds raised, we will be looking to perfect our existing products and introduce tools for simplifying the investing journey of investors. Furthermore, the capital will be utilized to expand the team globally and establish Mudrex as a leading crypto investment platform" - says Edul Patel, Co-founder & CEO, Mudrex.

Mudrex - Challenges Faced

Mudrex was started as a cryptocurrency exchange for India. The biggest challenge they faced was right before the launch of the platform in 2018. But just before going live, the RBI’s single unilateral decision robbed Mudrex of its entire market. On 8th April, the RBI decided to ban crypto trading in India which led to a massive setback for Mudrex. The team realized that an exchange is highly commoditized and the actual value is the investing part. They wanted to serve a global audience, hence turning the setback into an opportunity. Years later they launched Mudrex as a crypto investment platform.

Mudrex - Business Model & Revenue Model

In Mudrex, there is a fee for different algorithms that you choose to invest with. The starting fee is as low as 1%-2% on average per month for investing in these products. And typically users see 7%-8% on their returns.

Mudrex - Future Plans

There are 6 major things Mudrex plans to work on:

1. Mudrex Exchange - Build Mudrex's retail-focused property. The team is building a full-fledged end-to-end crypto trading and investing platform. Users will be able to buy crypto from fiat, store it, trade it and invest it. They are working on a mobile app as well

2. Mudrex Capital focused on institutions - Provide bespoke services to 250k USD> clients. Institutional investors focused on the asset management desk providing bespoke products to HNIs, Funds, and institutions. The minimum check size for this is 250k. Mudrex will be advancing this desk to start providing services to others

3. Investment as a service

Working with liquidity gatekeepers as channel partners
Provide investment options directly to exchanges, wallets, and liquidity sources as a service to let their users invest
Five global integrations with exchanges across confirmed, there are 13 more in the pipeline.

4. ‘Shopify For traders’

Work with product gatekeepers as channel partners.
Repackage the Mudrex billing, subscription, and payments infrastructure in a service that traders use to run their own subscription business and community.
The pilot is already running. The product will go live soon this year

5. Products based on Mutual funds like layer

Mudrex is planning to launch a Crypto product based on themes in the upcoming weeks
The product modeled on the lines of ETFs/Mutual Fund will help users to participate in crypto retail

6. Team Expansion - Mudrex recently raised $2.5 million from Nexus Venture Partners as part of its seed round. The funds will be used to expand the company's personnel and operations, as well as develop new products that meet global regulatory requirements.

Mudrex - FAQs

What is Mudrex?

Mudrex is a Global Crypto Investment Platform. It deals in 2 Products - Mudrex Portfolio & Mudrex Coin Sets. The former democratizes access to investment opportunities in financial markets for investors and offers trading strategies that best suit the risk profile. Whereas Mudrex Coin Sets are baskets of crypto tokens that will help users generate good returns in the long term.

Who are the founders of Mudrex?