Sahi Raises $33M Series B for AI Stock Trading

Sahi Raises $33 Million in Series B Round to Redefine AI-Powered Stock Trading in India

India's fintech landscape is witnessing a fresh wave of confidence from global venture capital, and the latest proof of that is Bengaluru-based stock trading startup Sahi, which has successfully closed a $33 million Series B funding round. The round was led by Accel, one of the most prominent venture capital firms globally, with continued backing from Elevation Capital. This landmark development in AI funding news signals not just a vote of confidence in Sahi as a business, but also a broader bet on the convergence of artificial intelligence and retail stock trading in India. What makes this round particularly remarkable is how quickly Sahi has scaled in a market dominated by entrenched players — and how clearly AI sits at the heart of its competitive edge.

The Bengaluru startup, founded barely three years ago, has now crossed a $200 million valuation — more than tripling its worth from the $60 million valuation it held during its Series A round just under a year ago. For a company that only began operations in January 2025, this trajectory is nothing short of extraordinary. The round underscores a growing recognition among investors worldwide that India's retail trading ecosystem is ripe for disruption, and that AI-native platforms are best positioned to lead that disruption.

Inside the Funding Round: Who Backed Sahi and at What Valuation?

The $33 million Series B round marks a significant inflection point in the company's journey, both in terms of the quantum of capital raised and the speed at which it followed the previous round. Accel Growth contributed approximately $20 million of the total raise, with the remaining funds coming from existing investors, primarily Elevation Capital, which has backed the startup since its early days. The fact that both of Sahi's existing institutional backers have chosen to double down on their investment is itself a powerful endorsement of the platform's performance metrics and future potential.

This round of AI funding comes less than twelve months after Sahi raised $10.5 million in its Series A in June 2025, which was also led by Accel and Elevation Capital. In between those two rounds, the company's valuation has grown more than threefold — from $60 million at Series A to approximately $200 million at Series B. That kind of valuation growth in under a year is rare even by the standards of India's fast-moving startup ecosystem. It reflects not just investor optimism but hard operational data: the company's trade volumes have grown 24 times, and its active trader base has expanded 19 times between April 2025 and March 2026. These are not numbers that get manufactured through marketing spend alone — they speak to a product that traders are genuinely choosing and coming back to.

As part of the existing ownership structure established at the time of Series A, Elevation Capital and Accel each held approximately 20% stakes in the company. Co-founders Dale Vaz and Manish Jain together held around 47.17% of the business, while the ESOP pool stood at 12.41%. A small 0.10% stake was also held by Sriharsha Majety, the co-founder and CEO of Swiggy — a detail that underlines the personal connections that underpin Sahi's founding story. With the Series B now closed, the capital will be deployed across three strategic pillars: deepening the company's technology and AI stack, broadening its product suite into new trading categories, and aggressively scaling its user base across India.

From Swiggy's Kitchen to the Trading Floor: The Story Behind Sahi

To understand why Sahi has attracted this level of AI funding news attention and investor enthusiasm, it helps to understand the people who built it. Sahi was co-founded in 2023 by Dale Vaz, the former Chief Technology Officer of Swiggy, and Manish Jain, who previously served as an executive at Kotak Securities. These are not first-time founders experimenting with an idea — they are seasoned professionals who bring a rare combination of deep technology experience and financial markets expertise to the table.

Dale Vaz, before his stint as Swiggy's CTO, also led engineering operations for Amazon India. His technology-first mindset is deeply embedded in how Sahi has been designed and built. The platform is not simply a trading interface layered over legacy infrastructure — it is an AI-native system built from the ground up to serve the needs of active, performance-driven traders. Manish Jain, on the other hand, brings the brokerage and financial markets credibility that gives Sahi its regulatory grounding and institutional depth. The startup operates under its own SEBI-registered broking licence, which is a key differentiator in a market where many new-age platforms operate through third-party arrangements.

The company formally began operations in January 2025, after spending roughly a year building its technology infrastructure post-seed funding in September 2023. This patient approach to product development — rather than rushing to market — has clearly paid off. Within just over a year of going live, Sahi has onboarded approximately 4 lakh (400,000) demat accounts and processed over 13 crore trades, with 86% of those trades executed in FY26 alone. The platform has also recently crossed a milestone of one million trades per day, a number that puts it firmly in the conversation with some of India's most established brokers.

AI-Native Architecture: The Engine Behind Sahi's Explosive Growth

At a time when most broking platforms are retrofitting AI features onto existing systems, Sahi has built artificial intelligence into the very core of its product. This is not just a marketing differentiator — it is a fundamental architectural decision that shapes everything from how trades are executed to how market intelligence is surfaced for users. The platform offers real-time AI-powered market scanners, in-house charting tools, and a lightning-fast user interface that has been engineered to minimise latency — a critical factor for active futures and options (F&O) traders for whom milliseconds genuinely matter.

The company's AI stack is designed to help traders make faster, more informed decisions without the information overload that plagues most trading platforms. Sahi's single-screen trading experience — where users can discover opportunities, analyse charts, and execute trades without switching contexts — is a product philosophy rooted in the performance trading community's actual workflow. This is the kind of nuanced understanding that comes from founders who have built high-performance consumer technology at scale. It also explains why the latest round of AI funding is being directed significantly toward enhancing this technology stack further.

Sahi has also secured a research analyst licence from SEBI, which will eventually allow it to offer formal investment advisory services to users. For now, the company has chosen to stay focused on its transactional brokerage business, building depth in execution quality before broadening into advisory. This measured approach is strategically sound — establishing trust and platform reliability with active traders first, before expanding into the more regulated and relationship-intensive advisory segment. As India's retail trading participation continues to grow, particularly in the F&O segment, Sahi's combination of AI intelligence and execution speed positions it to capture a meaningful share of this expanding market. The company currently handles around 3% of daily trades on Indian exchanges — a figure that, while modest in absolute terms, is remarkable for a platform that has been live for just over a year.

Taking on Giants: How Sahi Is Competing Against Zerodha, Groww, and Dhan

The Indian retail brokerage space is one of the most competitive arenas in the country's startup ecosystem. Zerodha, which pioneered the discount broking model in India, remains the go-to platform for serious active traders, known for its robust charting tools and low-cost structure. Groww, which surpassed Zerodha as the largest stock broking platform by active investor count in September 2023, has built a massive user base among first-time and millennial investors. Dhan has carved out a niche for itself among derivative traders with its advanced order management features. Into this crowded arena, Sahi is entering with a distinct proposition — and early traction suggests it is resonating.

Where Zerodha is comprehensive and Groww is accessible, Sahi is positioning itself as the performance trader's choice. The platform's flat ₹10 per order brokerage model makes it cost-competitive, but its real differentiator is the technology experience it delivers. Sahi's in-house charting system, its AI-powered intelligence layer, and its focus on execution speed are all calibrated for the segment of traders who care deeply about platform performance and data quality. These are traders who generate high volumes, switch platforms when they encounter friction, and are quick to evangelise tools that genuinely improve their outcomes.

The numbers suggest Sahi is succeeding in acquiring and retaining this audience. A 24x growth in trade volumes and a 19x growth in active traders over roughly twelve months is the kind of organic momentum that advertising money alone cannot buy — it is the result of a product that works well enough to drive word-of-mouth adoption within trading communities. The company's 13 crore trade milestone, with the vast majority completed in the most recent fiscal year, reinforces the idea that Sahi is not just acquiring accounts but actually converting them into active, frequent users. As per recent AI funding news making rounds across the fintech world, this level of user engagement is what distinguishes Sahi from the many trading apps that see sign-ups without meaningful ongoing activity.

The broader market dynamics also work in Sahi's favour. India's retail participation in equity markets has grown significantly over the past several years, driven by the democratisation of internet access, UPI-enabled seamless money movement, and a generation of younger investors who are comfortable managing their finances through mobile applications. The F&O segment in particular has seen explosive retail participation, even as SEBI has introduced new regulations aimed at protecting retail investors from excessive speculative activity. Sahi's focus on giving traders better tools — rather than simply cheaper access — may well be the right approach for a market that is maturing and becoming more discerning.

What's Next: How Sahi Plans to Deploy the $33 Million

With $33 million now in the bank and a valuation that has tripled in under a year, the question of how Sahi deploys this capital will be critical to determining whether the company can maintain its impressive growth trajectory. The company has outlined three broad areas of focus: continued investment in its technology and AI infrastructure, expansion of its product suite into new trading categories beyond F&O and cash equities, and scaling its user acquisition and activation efforts. Each of these is important, but the technology investment is perhaps the most foundational — because Sahi's entire competitive proposition rests on its ability to deliver a technically superior trading experience.

Deepening the AI stack likely means building more sophisticated market analysis tools, improving the personalisation of the trading experience for individual users, and potentially developing predictive intelligence features that help traders identify opportunities more effectively. It may also involve infrastructure investment to further reduce latency and improve platform reliability during periods of high market volatility — which is precisely when trading platforms are most stress-tested and most likely to lose user trust if they fail. As AI funding news continues to spotlight the intersection of fintech and artificial intelligence, Sahi's approach of building AI-first rather than AI-added gives it a structural advantage that is genuinely difficult for incumbents to replicate quickly.

Expansion into new trading categories could mean the introduction of commodity trading, currency derivatives, or even structured products — segments where Sahi's technology advantage would be equally applicable and where the incumbent competition may be less entrenched. The research analyst licence that Sahi has already secured lays the groundwork for a future advisory offering that could meaningfully deepen user engagement and create additional revenue streams beyond transactional brokerage. Growing from 4 lakh to potentially 10 lakh or more demat accounts in the next year would represent the kind of scaling that brings network effects and data advantages that further compound Sahi's AI capabilities.

The The AI World Organisation, which has been closely tracking AI funding trends across sectors, sees this investment in Sahi as part of a larger pattern of capital flowing into AI-native fintech platforms across Asia. The convergence of high-frequency trading demand, increasingly affordable computing infrastructure, and the rapid improvement in AI model capabilities is creating a generational opportunity for startups that can build with this technology at their core — rather than layering it on as an afterthought. Sahi, with its pedigree of founders, its institutional backers in Accel and Elevation Capital, and its strong early metrics, is emerging as one of the more compelling examples of this trend playing out in real time within the Indian market.

For retail traders navigating India's increasingly complex equity markets, Sahi's growth is ultimately good news. More competition, better tools, and smarter AI-driven insights raise the quality of the entire ecosystem. And if Sahi's trajectory over the next twelve to twenty-four months matches what it has delivered so far, the company may well be writing one of the more exciting chapters in India's fintech story.