What will the future of trading and investing look like?

If you think about it, trading and investing have changed a lot on the surface, but the fundamental act has remained more or less the same.

Platforms look better. They are easier to use. There is more information, more data, more products, and far better tools. But underneath all of that, you still place an order through a broker, which then goes to an exchange.

The question we keep asking ourselves at Zerodha and Rainmatter is: will this remain true in the future?

AI is changing how software is built and used. Market structure and regulations are evolving. There are new asset classes and technologies, such as tokenization, prediction markets, and other weird experiments emerging. 90% of it may be pure degeneracy, but you never know what might become mainstream.

I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the future, a broker becomes little more than a pipe between the customer and the exchange. The customer may interact with the markets through a completely personal, AI-built interface rather than a broker’s app.

We don’t know what the future of trading and investing will look like. But we think it may look radically different.

When we started Rainmatter in 2016, the idea was to back fintech founders building products that could help expand the markets. Over time, Rainmatter grew beyond fintech into health, climate, advanced manufacturing, sports, and other areas.

But given that finance seems to be changing, we are doubling down on fintech again to back ambitious founders.

We don’t know exactly what we are looking for, but I want to clarify what we are not looking for. We are not looking for another fancy dashboard, an options visualisation tool, or public data repackaged in a prettier UI.

We are looking for founders fundamentally rethinking how people might trade and invest in the future.