Karachi’s Seed Labs, which has developed a new trading app (called dTrade), has secured $6.4 million in capital through a seed funding round at a $50 million valuation.
Seed Labs co-founders Ahmad Jawaid, Zabi Mohebzada, Rabeel Jawaid, and Yameen Malik have helped create the dTrade app, which lets people trade derivatives without having to work with a brokerage or clearinghouse. The app also removes any counterparty risk.
The initiative is supported by VCs from 9 countries. Investors include institutional liquidity providers, Alameda Research, Kronos Research, LedgerPrime and several others that collectively trade 28B+/daily, the company’s management confirmed in a statement on Thursday (May 27, 2021). These liquidity providers will be supporting the team in creating a “highly liquid” and “easily accessible” derivatives exchange, according to a release.
Seed Labs has been co-founded (a year ago) by Gold Medalist at NUCES-FAST (in 2017) Yameen Malik. He reportedly has more than 6 publications in AI, and has experience working at Symantec as an application developer.
Rabeel Jawaid has a strong background in Physics and completed three degrees concurrently from the University of Pennsylvania, the announcement revealed. Jawaid, a co-founder at Seed Labs, is working alongside Zabi Mohebzada, who has a strong background in biological sciences and graduated from the University of Western Ontario before co-founding Seed Labs.
Ahmad Jawaid graduated from UC Berkeley and worked as a software developer in Silicon Valley before joining Seed Labs. Out of the 24 total team members at the company, 18 are currently based in Karachi, Pakistan and the other six are working overseas in Sydney, Toronto, Washington DC, Novi Sad, New York and San Francisco.
At the time of its launch, the platform will mainly provide a perpetual swap trading exchange.
As explained in the release, perpetual swap contracts are a type of derivative that lets traders earn profits from price fluctuations of assets. Any trading pair from any asset class may be used for trading, including commodities, equities, digital assets, and even pre-IPO stocks.
Zabi remarked:
“Right now our target markets are Europe and the Asia Pacific Region. The derivatives exchange is expected to launch in Q3 of this year and is currently undergoing the first round of technical security and penetration testing audits.”
The products currently available on dTrade will not be offered to US persons or residents of “any country or jurisdiction subject to US sanctions.”