Startup Deep Dive : Mudrex — users tripled to 3 million but the profit claim stays unverified

Mudrex, a Y Combinator-backed crypto investing platform with roots in Bengaluru, says its active user base tripled from 1 million to more than 3 million between 2023 and the end of 2024 — a 200% jump the company announced in January 2025, alongside a claim of a 10x to 20x surge in trading volume over the same year. The same company started life in 2018 with a plan to run a cryptocurrency exchange, a business the Reserve Bank of India made unbankable within days of launch.

Two founding-team pivots and a headquarters move to the United States later, Mudrex has become one of the more visible names among India’s crypto apps, sitting alongside CoinDCX, CoinSwitch, WazirX and a returning Coinbase. Its growth story, though, rests almost entirely on the company’s own press releases: no audited Indian filing for the business turned up in this reporting, and the one independent revenue estimate available suggests a far smaller climb than the multiples Mudrex quotes in public. Both numbers are real, sourced and worth holding in your head at once — the gap between them is the story.

Quick facts

What they do

Mudrex is an app for buying, trading and holding cryptocurrency, built mainly for Indian retail investors who find exchanges like WazirX or CoinDCX either too intimidating or too bare-bones. Alongside plain spot trading and crypto futures, it sells three packaged products: Coin Sets, ready-made baskets of tokens grouped by theme (DeFi, layer-1s, an NFT basket) that Mudrex curates and rebalances so a beginner does not have to pick individual coins; Mudrex Earn (formerly called Vault), which converts a user’s money into stablecoins and deploys them across lending and staking protocols for a yield; and an API layer that lets more experienced traders run their own strategies programmatically, a descendant of the algorithmic-trading tool the company started out building.

The origin

The four founders knew each other from IIT. Edul Patel graduated from IIT Bombay in 2011 and spent a couple of years trading at Deutsche Bank before leaving in 2013 to start a company called Niffler with Alankar Saxena, another Deutsche Bank alumnus and IIT Bombay graduate. Prince Arora, an IIT Kanpur graduate who had also worked at Deutsche Bank, became Patel’s co-founder and CTO at Niffler; after Niffler, Patel and Arora both landed at the local-services app Tapzo, which Amazon later acquired. Rohit Goyal, Patel’s junior at IIT Bombay, had already founded PaxPlay and co-founded Sabjiwala.com by the time the group reunited (StartupTalky, 2023).

In December 2017 the four decided to build a cryptocurrency exchange for the Indian market, then in the middle of its first retail bitcoin boom. They built it fast: by early April 2018 the exchange was ready to go live. It barely got the chance. On 5 April 2018 the Reserve Bank of India issued a circular barring every bank and regulated financial entity from providing services to any business dealing in virtual currencies (Business Standard, March 2020). An exchange nobody could bank was not a business, so the founders shelved the code within days of finishing it and went looking for a version of crypto that did not need an Indian bank account to survive.

The struggle years

What followed was less a single crisis than three separate ones, each of which could have ended the company.

The first was regulatory and lasted almost two years. The RBI’s banking circular held from April 2018 until the Supreme Court struck it down as “disproportionate” on 4 March 2020 (Business Standard, March 2020; Moneylife, 2020) — nearly two years in which any India-facing crypto business operated without reliable banking rails. Mudrex spent that stretch not as an exchange but as a tool for algorithmic traders: a no-code way to build and run trading bots on global exchanges, tested in a beta that reached roughly 400 active traders and about $500,000 in completed trades, mostly from India, Southeast Asia and the US (StartupTalky, 2023). It was a real product, but a small, technical one — a long way from the mass-market app Mudrex would need to become.

The second setback arrived from tax policy rather than banking. India’s Union Budget for 2022 introduced a flat 30% tax on gains from virtual digital assets plus a 1% tax deducted at source (TDS) on transactions above ₹50,000 a year, effective 1 July 2022 (ClearTax, 2022). The TDS in particular was designed to create a paper trail, and it did — at the cost of trading volumes on every Indian exchange, since every trade now surrendered a slice upfront regardless of whether it made money. Mudrex operated through this period alongside every domestic rival, absorbing the same volume shock without a public disclosure of how badly it was hit.

The third was reputational rather than financial: by mid-2024 fraudsters were running at least 38 fake websites and Telegram accounts impersonating Mudrex, luring victims with fake rewards and job offers. Around 15 people had already complained to Mudrex’s Bengaluru office or its support desk when the company went to the Delhi High Court; CEO Edul Patel estimated the real number of victims at closer to 1,000, with losses that could exceed $50,000 (CoinDesk, August 2024). The court ordered the 38 sites taken down within a day of hearing the petition — fast relief, but only after the damage to Mudrex’s brand among people who had never actually used the platform was already done.

The turning point

If there is a single event that changed Mudrex’s trajectory, it is the October 2021 launch of Coin Sets. Until then, Mudrex was still fundamentally the algo-trading tool born out of the 2018 pivot: useful to a narrow band of technically minded traders, not to the much larger pool of people who wanted crypto exposure without picking individual coins. Coin Sets reframed the product as something closer to a crypto mutual fund — pre-built, professionally curated baskets that a user could buy into for as little as $5, with Mudrex handling allocation, execution and rebalancing (BusinessToday, October 2021; Yahoo Finance, 2021).

The numbers on either side of that launch are stark. Before it, Mudrex’s own beta-era algo-trading figures topped out around 400 active traders. By February 2022, four months after Coin Sets went live and on the back of a fresh funding round, the company reported 450% user growth over the preceding four months and more than 100,000 users across over 100 countries (Entrackr, February 2022). By the end of 2024, that figure had grown roughly thirtyfold again, to more than 3 million active users (YourStory, January 2025; Mudrex, 2026). A product built for a niche of algorithmic traders had become a mass consumer app.

The money behind it

• 2019: $150,000 seed as part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 batch — Mudrex’s entry point into the Silicon Valley accelerator network (Blockchain Magazine; YC company page, 2019).
• August 2021: $2.5 million seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners, with Village Global and angel investors Kunal Shah, Anand Chandrasekaran and Anjali Bansal (Business Standard, August 2021; FinTech Global, August 2021).
• February 2022: $6.5 million pre-Series A from Arkam Ventures, Tribe Capital and Bolt by QED Investors, raised explicitly to fund user acquisition, licensing and geographic expansion beyond India (Entrackr, February 2022).
• Total raised: about $22.2 million across five rounds and roughly 20 investors since 2019, according to aggregator Tracxn — the company has not publicly disclosed a valuation at any point, and no figure from this reporting could be independently confirmed against a primary source, so none is stated here.

Each named backer did something specific for the company beyond writing a cheque: Y Combinator gave four Indian founders with no US network a route into Silicon Valley just as their first business model had been regulated out of existence; Nexus Venture Partners, one of India’s oldest institutional VCs, put its domestic credibility behind a sector most mainstream Indian funds were still avoiding in 2021; and Arkam Ventures and Tribe Capital, both mid-market and growth-stage specialists, arrived just as Coin Sets needed capital to scale past its first 100,000 users.

How it makes money

Mudrex earns the way most crypto brokerages do: a cut of every transaction, plus a spread on the products it manages for people rather than one big subscription fee.

• Spot trading fees: a base rate of 0.45% for both makers and takers, tapering down to 0.15% once a user’s trailing 30-day volume passes $5 million — a volume-tiered structure that rewards its most active traders with the thinnest margins (Mudrex fee schedule, via TradersUnion, 2026).
• Futures trading fees: a much thinner 0.03% to 0.05% per trade, again scaled by 30-day volume — futures are a volume play, not a margin play (TradersUnion, 2026).
• Coin Sets exit fee: free to hold, but a 1% early-exit charge applies if a basket is redeemed within 30 days of purchase — a fee explicitly designed to discourage the kind of short-term flipping the product was not built for (Mudrex support documentation, 2026).
• Mudrex Earn (formerly Vault): advertised at up to 10% annual yield with no lock-in, funded by deploying users’ stablecoins across roughly nine different DeFi lending, staking and liquidity strategies (Mudrex blog, 2024). Mudrex does not charge a subscription fee for Earn; its margin sits in the spread between what its DeFi deployments return and what it pays depositors.

The part people tend to get wrong is Earn. A yield product with “no lock-in” reads like a savings account, but the underlying capital is sitting in DeFi protocols exposed to smart-contract bugs, stablecoin de-pegging and counterparty risk — the same risk class that has wiped out yield products at other crypto platforms. Mudrex’s spread there is real revenue, but it is revenue earned by taking on risk the marketing copy does not dwell on.

The numbers

Mudrex, as a privately held, US-headquartered company, does not appear to file standalone financial statements with India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs, and no audited accounts for any entity in the group turned up in this reporting. The only revenue series available is a third-party estimate from Latka, explicitly labelled by that source as an estimate rather than a filed figure. No profit or loss figure — audited or otherwise — could be sourced at all; Mudrex’s own claim of profitability (DQIndia, January 2025) is a company statement, not a disclosed number.

Read that table next to the hook at the top of this piece. Mudrex’s own press materials describe a 10x revenue surge and a 20x jump in monthly trading volume over 2024 (CXOToday, October 2024; DQIndia, January 2025). Latka’s independent estimate puts 2024 revenue about 29% above 2023 — real growth, but nowhere near an order of magnitude. The two claims are not describing the same metric (one is revenue, the other trading volume, which can rise sharply without revenue following at the same rate, since fees are a small percentage of volume), but the gap is wide enough that it should be read as two data points rather than one confirmed number, exactly the kind of disclosure hole that persists across most privately held crypto platforms.

Where the money comes from

• Geography: about 80% of active users are in India, with roughly 20% in the European Union, where Mudrex holds a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) registration and Italian OAM compliance (DQIndia, January 2025; Analytics Insight, October 2024).
• Product mix: spot trading and futures remain the base of transaction volume; Coin Sets and Mudrex Earn are the products built to capture users who would not otherwise trade actively, converting one-off traders into holders who generate recurring spread or exit-fee revenue.
• Assets under management: about $25 million as of January 2025 — a modest number next to the 3-million-plus user count, implying most accounts hold small balances rather than large ones (DQIndia, January 2025; Mudrex, 2026).
• The surprise: a platform with 3 million-plus claimed users is managing roughly $8 per user on average if the AUM figure is spread evenly — a reminder that user counts and app downloads in Indian fintech routinely dwarf the actual capital committed.

The risks

• Regulatory drag on the home market: India’s 30% flat tax on crypto gains plus 1% TDS on transactions above ₹50,000, in force since 1 July 2022, keeps pushing volume-sensitive traders toward offshore or peer-to-peer venues that skip the deduction, directly suppressing the on-platform volume Mudrex’s fee-based model depends on (ClearTax, 2022).
• Security and custody risk industry-wide: WazirX, India’s then-largest exchange, lost about $234.9 million — roughly 45% of its reserves — to a hack on 18 July 2024, later linked to the Lazarus Group (Wikipedia, citing contemporary reporting, 2024). Mudrex was not the victim in that incident, but it operates the same custodial, hot-wallet model, and the episode is a live reminder of what a single security failure can do to any Indian crypto platform’s user trust.
• Brand-impersonation fraud: the 38-site scam network shut down by the Delhi High Court in August 2024 shows Mudrex’s own name has already been weaponised against the public it is trying to attract, with real, though unquantified, reputational cost (CoinDesk, August 2024).
• Intensifying, better-funded competition: Coinbase relaunched in India through 2025 and, from 1 June 2026, began offering direct rupee deposits and withdrawals via IMPS, while Binance re-registered with India’s Financial Intelligence Unit in 2024 — both global giants entering a market Mudrex has so far shared mainly with domestic rivals CoinDCX and CoinSwitch (CoinDesk, May 2026).

The takeaway

Mudrex’s clearest lesson is not about crypto specifically. It is that the business a regulator kills is sometimes just the wrong wrapper for the insight underneath. The founders did not set out to build an algorithmic trading tool, and they did not set out to build a Coin Sets-style basket product either — both were what was left standing after a plan got taken off the table by forces outside their control. The company that survived is the one that kept testing what the same team’s skills could sell next, rather than waiting for the first idea to be allowed back.

Frequently asked questions

What does Mudrex actually sell?

A crypto app offering spot trading, crypto futures, thematic token baskets called Coin Sets, a yield product called Mudrex Earn, and an API for algorithmic traders — aimed mostly at Indian retail investors, with a smaller European user base.

Who founded Mudrex and when?

Edul Patel, Alankar Saxena, Rohit Goyal and Prince Arora, all connected through IIT and, for three of them, Deutsche Bank, founded Mudrex in 2018, initially as a crypto exchange.

How much funding has Mudrex raised?

About $22.2 million across five rounds since 2019, per Tracxn, from backers including Y Combinator, Nexus Venture Partners, Arkam Ventures, Tribe Capital and Bolt by QED Investors. No valuation has been publicly disclosed.

Is Mudrex profitable?

The company told YourStory in January 2025 that it was profitable, but no audited financial statement confirming that claim was found in this reporting; a third-party estimate puts 2024 revenue at roughly $2.2 million.

Why did Mudrex stop trying to be a crypto exchange?

The Reserve Bank of India’s 5 April 2018 circular barred banks from servicing crypto businesses, making an India-facing exchange unbankable within days of Mudrex’s exchange going live; the founders pivoted to algorithmic trading tools instead.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• StartupTalky, “Growth Story of Mudrex: A Global Crypto Investment Platform,” 2023
• YourStory, “Crypto startup Mudrex by IIT alumni lets traders automate and track their strategies,” June 2019
• YourStory, “Crypto exchange Mudrex reports 200% growth in user base in 2024,” January 2025
• Entrackr, “Mudrex raises $6.5 Mn in pre-Series A round,” February 2022
• Business Standard, “Mudrex raises $2.5 mn in seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners,” August 2021
• Business Standard, “Supreme Court quashes ‘disproportionate’ RBI ban on cryptocurrencies,” March 2020
• Moneylife, “Supreme Court Quashes RBI Ban on Banking Services to Cryptocurrency Dealers,” 2020
• FinTech Global, “YC-backed crypto startup Mudrex notches $2.5m in seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners,” August 2021
• BusinessToday, “Now a mutual fund for crypto investors! Mudrex announces Coin Sets for retail investors,” October 2021
• Yahoo Finance / PR Newswire, “Mudrex launches ‘Coin Sets’,” 2021
• ClearTax, “TDS on Crypto in India,” 2022
• CoinDesk, “Indian Court Orders Scam Websites Using Crypto Exchange Mudrex’s Name to Be Taken Down,” August 2024
• CXOToday, “Mudrex Becomes Fastest Growing Crypto Platform in India,” October 2024
• Analytics Insight, “Mudrex Becomes Fastest Growing Crypto Platform in India,” October 2024
• DQIndia, “Mudrex’s founder on scaling to millions of crypto users,” January 2025
• Latka, “Mudrex Revenue 2024: $2.2M Est. ARR, $150K Raised” (getlatka.com), accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, “Mudrex – 2026 Funding Rounds & List of Investors,” accessed September 2026
• Mudrex, “About Mudrex” (mudrex.com/about-us), accessed September 2026
• Mudrex Blog, “Earn 10% interest with Vault,” and Mudrex fee documentation via TradersUnion, “All Mudrex Fees,” 2026
• Wikipedia, “2024 WazirX hack,” accessed September 2026
• CoinDesk, “Coinbase makes a major play for India’s booming $3 billion crypto market with local currency launch,” May 2026

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